A question in principal about marlin and 8 bit ender 3 boards.

A while back I was struggling with Arduino io trying to compile an update, I have been wondering since if the reason it would not compile was because I didn’t have enough room since it was only an 8 bit card. How could I determine that?

Marlin no longer supports the default Arduino IDE. It uses Visual Studio Code (VSCode) now.

With VSCode compiling marlin is easy like hell. It even has a plugin to make compiling more easy. You don´t have to edit any file to get the default configuration compiled.

It basically takes six steps

  1. install vscode
  2. run vscode and install the “PlatformIO” and the “Auto Build Marlin” plugin.
  3. download latest marlin
  4. copy the configuration files for your printer into the marlin folder
  5. open the marlin folder using the “PlatformIO” plugin open folder button.
  6. open the UI of “Auto Build Marlin” and hit the build
    -> done.

Unlike with the ArduinoIDE you don´t need to manually install libraries and stuff. The VSCode build is doing that the first time you compile automatically.

It does not matter if you have an 8 bit or 32 bit board with the default configuration. You may get an error when you enable too many features and the binary is bigger than your printers flash, but this is clearly specified as the output always spits stuff like “803433 of 976000 flash memory used” after each compile, which give you a clear indication how much for additional features is left and how much the last feature you enabled ate away.

@Geit You are an extraordinary source of information as are so many others in this forum.
I who am an old brain damaged Newbie (2 years) to this game with an ender 3 pro to play with, could never cope with all the problems that idiots like me have without your expert assistance and I thank you all.

Just to add a little bit to @Geit’s post: after you download Marlin & it’s configuration files, open the configuration files folder, find your printer in the list, open that folder, find the configuration.h & configuration.adv.h files in your printer’s folder, drag them over to the window of your running copy of VSCode.

I don’t know if it is worth upgrading when all I really want to do is insert some g-code that gives me the M600 change filament rigamarole in Prusa slicer. Why can I insert change filament in Cura but not in Prusa?