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!