Anyone interested in an ender update should watch this video on CHEP.

He explains some recent Creality updates with 32 bit and 8 bit boards and their versions of marlin. Understanding Creality Ender 3 Control Board Firmware Fiasco - YouTube

I watched it the other day. It was very informative if you have a Creality printer. I opened up my new Ender 3 v2 to see if by chance it had the v4.2.7 board which it didnt had a v4.2.2. I’m debating putting Marlin 2 on it from the site mentioned. My Ender 3 is printing so good that I hate to mess with it but it would restore all the stuff Creality left out. I had it install a plugin to use Octoprint as it wasn’t reporting the temp correctly.

Thats the problem with precompiled firmwares. You never know what they changed inside.

Best is to grab Marlin and the default configurations for your printer and compile it yourself. That way you not only learn how to do that, you are able to change stuff you want to change and recompile with future versions of marlin.

That’s where I always have a problem. Recompiling.

When I compile Marlin & get errors, the very 1st thing I check is the size of the compiled file: is the error saying the file is too large to fit into the space available on my 8-bit 1.1.5 Silent board?

The trouble I had was understanding the error message. Mr. Google failed me!

If you’re first trying to compile Marlin, do it with the default configurations for your printer/mainboard first, before you make any changes whatsoever to those configuration.h and configuration_adv.h files. That way you know it’ll work, and when it doesn’t work, it’s something you screwed up. Also double-check that platformio.ini has the right environment set up for your mainboard, and that PlatformIO is even installed in the first place.

Finally, there’s an option to enable vscode to work properly with long pathnames when you install it (depending on platform), but it’s a good idea to move the whole firmware folder to somewhere close to the root of the drive (like c:\firmware\ or something like that). I have not had a problem with pretty deep pathnames on macos, but this might be a hiccup on your platform.

@Zardozer, how do you set up VS Code to use long pathnames?

Hm, could have sworn there was an option on install, but I was mixing it up with my macos installs it seems which doesn’t have the problem. I think it’s generally something like a 260 character limit, and there are workarounds like longpathtool. I haven’t used it though, I think for our purposes it’s easier to move it to a shallower path.

Yes, the Windows path name length limit is 260 & it does sometimes cause issues.