Marlin (firmware)

Marlin was first created in 2011 for the RepRap and Ultimaker printers by combining elements from the open source Grbl and Sprinter projects. Development continued at a slow pace while gaining in popularity and acceptance as a superior alternative to the other available firmware. By 2015, companies were beginning to introduce commercial 3D printers with Marlin pre-installed and contributing their improvements to the project. Early machines included the Ultimaker 1, the TAZ series by Aleph Objects and the Prusa i3 by Prusa Research. By 2018 manufacturers had begun to favor boards with more powerful and efficient ARM processors, often at a lower cost than the AVR boards they supplant. After extensive refactoring Marlin 2.0 was officially released in late 2019 with full support for 32-bit ARM-based controller boards through a lightweight extensible hardware access layer. While Marlin 1.x had only supported 8-bit AVR (e.g., ATMega) and ATSAM3X8E (Due) platforms, the HAL added ATSAMD51 (Grand Central), Espressif ESP32, NXP LPC176x, and STMicro STM32. Marlin also acquired HAL code to run natively on Linux, Mac, and Windows, but only within a simulation for debugging purposes. As of October 2022, Marlin was still under active development and continues to be very popular, claiming to be "the most widely used 3D printing firmware in the world." == Technical ==

Marlin firmware is hosted on GitHub, where it is developed and maintained by a community of contributors. Marlin's lead developer is Scott Lahteine (aka Thinkyhead), an independent shareware and former Amiga game developer who joined the project in 2014. == License ==

Marlin is distributed under the GPL license which requires that organizations and individuals share their source code if they distribute the firmware in binary form, including firmware that comes pre-installed on the mainboard. Vendors have occasionally failed to comply with the license, leading to some distributors dropping their products. In 2018 the US distributor Printed Solid ended its relationship with Creality due to GPL violations and quality issues. As of 2022, some vendors are still spotty in their compliance, deflecting customer requests for the source code for an extended period or in perpetuity after a product release. == Usage and license compliance ==

Marlin firmware is used by several 3D printer manufacturers, most of which are fully compliant with the license. Compliance is tracked by Tim Hoogland of TH3D Studio, et. al.. The following table may be out of date by the time you read this. ==See also==