3D printer firmware should be managed in git

[emka]

We have two different versions of Marlin on the Kossels and Prusas, and four different calibration settings.

• [ ] Find out which Marlin versions the manufacturer versions were forked from (not required)
• [x] Clone the upstream Marlin and add branches for our Kossel and Prusa forks (starting from the historical commit)
• [ ] Create forks from the manufacturer branches to hold our individual printer calibration values
• [ ] Check out the latest upstream Marlin and merge with manufacturer modifications to have current firmware on all printers with individual calibration settings

[LukasFreeze]

This is not something I as a git noob will try on my own, but once we have accomplished this I suggest the first change to all firmwares to be a check whether the G-code was sliced with the correct profile in Cura (where we would add an appropriate comment line in the beginning, e.g. "Heidelberg Makerspace i3 A"

[emka]

I was trying to find out which commit a changed source tree was based on and wrote a little quick-and-dirty script, which could be reused for this purpose:

#!/bin/bash

NUM_COMMITS=100
COMPARE_DIR=../other_source/

# get list of last commits
commitlist=$(git log --oneline | head -n$NUM_COMMITS | awk '{print $1}')
original_commit=$(echo $commitlist  | awk '{print $1}')

for commit in $commitlist
do
    git checkout -q $commit

    # count differences
    num_differences=$(diff . $COMPARE_DIR | wc -l)
    echo $commit $num_differences
done

git checkout $original_commit

[emka]

@LukasFreeze I could run that script for you if you give me the manufacturer's source code for both printer types. Not sure what @DirkToewe found out already.

[LukasFreeze]

the Kossels run on "Rich Cattel Marlin" which was last updated in January 2015 - should still be correct, we built them in April that year

[emka]

In that case I think we could just switch to upstream Marlin. If I got it correctly the "RIchCattel" fork was created to add delta printer support, but that is supported in upstream now as well. The current release is 1.0.2-2, maybe we should wait for 1.1 (RC8 has known issues that I don't like) or just start adapting the default configuration for 1.0.2 already.

[emka]

I forked the upstream project and created a Kossel branch from the 1.0.2-2 tag.