Marlin 2.0 (Really!) (Patreon)

Yes, it’s finally here! Marlin 2.0 is ready for the next generation of RepRap electronics with support for several 32-bit boards and many new features to improve your print quality and printing experience. Visit the release page for a complete list of changes.

Highlights

• Improved power-loss recovery
• Prusa Multi-Material Unit 2 support
• Gradients and Gradient Virtual Tools for mixing extruders
• Toolchanger support
• "Auto Build Marlin" plugin for VSCode for one-click build/upload
• Extensible UI system for touch screens (thanks AlephObjects!)
• IDEX mirrored printing
• Cancel Objects support (M486)
• Games for Graphical LCD

Catching Up

Hey patrons, how have you been? I can't believe it's been over 15 months since the release of 1.1.9, and a lot has changed around here. We haven’t talked in a while, so let’s catch up.

I'm still in Austin, Texas, but now in the West Campus area. It’s not quite as “hip” as the East Side, but there’s a good grocery and there's a place a few blocks away where we can get phat veggie burgers with fries till 2am — very much appreciated for those late night coding and testing sessions.

My friend and colleague Luu moved here last year to help with Marlin testing and documentation. As an added bonus, Luu also been tinkering with Marlin on a K40 laser cutter, so we're working on making several improvements to Marlin's laser support in the next release (soon!).

The workshop has been coming together a bit more. We keep finding better furniture on the sidewalk to replace our tables built from palettes. Several boards have been donated and we have been doing lots of testing with them. We upgraded the two CR-10S machines we use for most of our printing with LPC176x-based boards and Trinamic drivers.

Geeetech kindly donated two printers with mixing extruders, enabling me to test and improve multi-color, mixing, and gradients. Even though I wrote the original mixing extruder code, these are the first machines I've actually had to test with, and it was a great help.

More exciting still, E3D sent us a Toolchanger beta unit and it's all set up and ready to go. This is a really nice machine and produces amazing results. I plan to get Marlin installed and running well on Duet boards, but I wanted to get version 2.0 out before diving into this. For the impatient, Marlin has gained some toolchanger features, and we've seen a few toolchanger units using boards that Marlin does support. So once we get the hardware support working, I'm pretty confident we'll be doing multi-material prints the same day!

Plans for 2020

I have no plans other than continuing to maintain and improve Marlin, and there's a long list to get through. Just about every feature needs refinement, and the code is still not as pretty as I would like. Now that the major release is done I plan to produce more YouTube content explaining Marlin internals and diving into the technical side of things.

Your patronage is appreciated!

In full disclosure, the base expenses for the apartment rent, bills, and food is about $2000 per month at this place, and it's always at the edge. In fact, we're looking for a new place with a lower rent (and more space) because funding has been so uncertain. One of our most longstanding and generous patrons has been AlephObjects, and as you may know they've had to rein in their costs, so that is a big hit.

Other options

GitHub has accepted me into their GitHub Sponsors program, so you now have the option to donate directly through GitHub. The really great thing about this option is that GitHub will match every dollar of your donation during the first year (up to $5000). If that sounds like a great deal to you, head over to my GitHub Sponsors page and pick a tier!

I've updated my website with a full list of Marlin Funding Options so you can choose the one that works best for you.

Merchandise

With Marlin funding at only half the level where it was last year, we've had to get a little more creative. So we had some T-shirts printed and brought a bunch of them to ERRF2019. If you like to wear your Marlin pride on your sleeve, head on over to Spreadshirt to check out the merch. All proceeds go directly to keeping us afloat while we work on the next release.