This is very very much in my current wheelhouse. My (extremely genius) friend Owen Trueblood reverse engineered the Brother PE-150 [0] and made a replacement motherboard, replacing the stock one, to control it over USB.

The PE-150 is a great example of the absurdity/sadness of the embroidery world: today, you can have those machines for $100 on eBay, completely functional, but being sold/abandoned because they use a proprietary cartridge holding proprietary data that no one wants to deal with.

Even novel Brother machines that have USB connectors still force you to use terrible apps and lock you into subscriptions. This entire world - which is/should be full of twee and about making beautiful things with your hands - is somehow corrupted with this merchandising/everything-software-should-have-a-price mentality which is just so sad.

Nothing to announce announce, but I 100000000000000000000000000000000000% want to make embroidery machines more accessible, open, and free of this balagan.

A few more links on this topic:

- https://github.com/CreativeInquiry/PEmbroider !! Check the "Motivation" section of the readme!

- https://emberdesign.net/ - a startup by another friend, with a really great online editor, and which exports a variety of formats

[0] https://owentrueblood.com/blog/2024/12/10/reverse-engineerin...

Other friend and Ember cofounder here. Thanks for the shoutout!

I'm happy to say that I am very much fighting this fight! The embroidery software ecosystem is pretty wild. Insanely expensive proprietary software with interfaces straight out of Windows 95, arbitrary operating system restrictions, and surprisingly little open-source tooling.

A big part of what we're trying to do with Ember is make embroidery digitizing more accessible. To that end I've been building an open-source JavaScript/TypeScript library called stitchjs (https://github.com/stitchables/stitchjs), with the goal of making it easier for other developers to build their own embroidery tools.

And on the hardware side we've been developing an open source ESP32 dongle that plugs directly into embroidery machines and lets you send designs to them wirelessly from the browser (https://github.com/EmberSoftwareInc/ember-link). The idea of a $10 microcontroller bridging the gap between modern software and decades of proprietary embroidery hardware is pretty exciting to me.

There's so much room for open source software and hardware in this space. Really cool to see more people working on it!