Setup your Mac to build Marlin 2 0

In this video, I'll walk you through the steps for configure your Mac to compile Marlin 2.0 firmware.

Hello, my name is Daniel, welcome to the CrossLink channel. Our mission is to help 1 million people getting more successful with 3d printing and if you're here for the first time, subscribe and enable bell notifications so you don't miss anything.

So, you wanna compile Marlin 2.0 on your Mac. This video is about how to setup your Mac to be ready to do that, let's get into the video.

As usual all links to external documentation and software that I'm referring to are linked in the description of this video.

So, first step is to install visual studio code from www.visualstudio.com.

Make sure you don't select any of the other options like visual studio full featured or visualstudio for mac as strange as it may sound. Visual Studio Code is the thing that we want.

So select Download Visual studio code then selecting the MacOs Package.

So after that package has landed in our downloads bin, let's open up finder and move that package over to the applications.

Now, we're gonna launch it for the first time and we should confirm to open it, that's a usual warning if you download packages directly from the internet.

Open the extensions tab on the left hand side of the window.

In the search field, enter "platformio" and then select "PlatformIO IDE" from the results list.

Now, click the "Install" button and wait until the installation process is finished. Don't launch any other installation at the same time and make sure, you don't close visual studio code until it's done installing.

There might be a message saying "Please reload window" or please restart vscode after the installation. If you see this, please close Visual Studio Code and launch it again.

After the installation is finished, click on the extensions tab of visual studio code again and search for the extension "auto build marlin".

Install this extension by clicking "install".

Now you should have Auto build marlin and PlatformIO IDE in the list of installed extensions.

Next, we wanna do a final check if we can compile Marlin firmware with this setup.

For that you can either use a fresh copy of Marlin 2.0 firmware or use an existing copy of Marlin 2.0 as I am doing it right now.

The contents of your Marlin folder should look similar to this. Here is the platformio.ini file that indicates, this is a platformio project.

So let's open the Marlin 2.0 project in visual studio code. Open the folder tab and click open folder and now you need to navigate to the folder where you just unpacked your Marlin sources and then select the subfolder where the platformio is in and all the other subfolders and then click open.

So that's going to open the Marlin folder structure here in the explorer section. And also because it is a platformio project, platformio is going to open as a new tab.

Now finally, open up the Auto Build Marlin tab, that should be here in the left menu shown as a Big "M".

And then move your mouse cursor into this upper section to make those different icons visible. So now you can either directly click the Build button here in this section or first show the ABM Panel, that's the auto build marlin panel.

Now, depending on the configuration that you might have, there will be different environments available here and if there is more than one environment to select from and you hit that build button, you will also get a notification that you have to select one environment first to compile it.

So for showing this, it's not really important what environment I use, I'm just going to show you what should happen if you click one of the build buttons - so let's use the mega2560 in this case - Auto Build Marlin will start the corresponding build and should come out with a success message at the very end.

So you're now ready to compile Marlin 2.0 on your Mac. I've done a bunch of videos about how to configure and upload Marlin 2.0 for different printer models and mainboards on my channel, so check them out if you like.

Thanks for watching - see you next time