Just wanted to let people know about this new serial packing protocol that been added to Marlin
Its called MEATPACK. It allows for a higher data rate for the same baud rate. This is very useful if your have a controller that is using usb/serial chips (serial ports 0-7 in marlin)
Basically what it does is take the most common Ascii characters found in G-code, each of which take one byte, and combines two characters into one byte for sending over the serial link.
It can also optionally strip out spaces from the gcodes, G command only. As these are not needed. This improves packing even further.
Meatpack has two parts, the sending program and the firmware component.
For the sending program at this time there is only meatpack plugin for octopint [
plugins.octoprint.org]
Printrun/Pronterface is being worked on. Hopefully others will implement this as well in due time.
For the firmware component it is already in Marlin bugfix Just enable #define MEATPACK in Configuration_adv.h
It is also being added into Prusa firmware, but is not quite there yet. You can get unofficial Prusa firmware with meatpack from [
github.com]
More information can be found here [
github.com]
Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 01/28/2021 04:10AM by Dust.
