Embroidery has a lot of hobbyists who pay absolutely ridiculous money for digitizing software. It is in dire need of cheap and easy solutions. I worked on this problem about 10 years ago with a friend. We built out fairly sophisticated digitization library for a good amount of embroidery formats. We ended up booking a booth at an embroidery roadshow to show our work and unfortunately things fizzled out before we got there. Good to see this niche getting disrupted.

I have started doing the same. For a few cents on Deepseek you get full reverse engineering of apps, firmware, can patch whatever and essentially build anything that works for yourself. Leftovers can be done with local LLMs for free.

Many apps/products can be freed and owners can take ownership of what's theirs. It doesn't even need to be a community effort as you can make something fully tailored. It also frees you from gated app stores as distribution channels, and all the unnecessary tracking.

It will take years for many nasty apps/companies to catch up, so nerds should enjoy this new superpower.

I'll have to give this a try. Back when I was trying to do embroidery with my $300 machine, I found that Hatch was the only software that would consistently give me good results. The only problem was that Hatch (at the time) was over $1,000 USD. I am a hobbyist, I refuse to pay that much for a hobby I hardly engage with. The saving grace there was that Hatch had a 30 day free trial, which I could continue to renew with a different email.

About a year into doing this, they patched it so the license server would save your HWID and would not run in a VM anymore. I decided to just give up on the hobby right there.

Maybe this will finally get me to pull the machine out of the garage and get back into it!

Super cool, but I wish you said both what your $300 machine is and also what machines this is compatible with somewhere very clear.

The readme does not specify which brand(s) or machine(s) are supported? It only mentions BT for communication? Is there then a kind of standard protoc?

I did not know you could get an embroidery machine for $300!! This seems very cool. T-shirts with an embroidered logo always look so much nicer than any others. I could see myself getting into this.

Love this type of stuff but afraid it won't last. Only a matter of time before OEMs ask same LLM to setup secure boot with signed firmware with anti-rollback and pinned certs.

There is already prior art like anything Google (phones, Fitbit)

I wonder if anyone has done this to the Cricut machines yet

i've been having fun doing these sort of fun apps as well. did something similar where i had a peloton bike but didnt want to pay $50/month sub. got codex to write a launcher and app that just plays youtube videos , which is pretty all i needed. sharing here if anyone else has an old bike lying around :)

https://github.com/sanjaykmenon/BikeTube

Interesting, Youtuber William Osman is also working on something similar, but for full size industrial machines. I'm not sure if its public released yet though.

Also don't forget Linus him self wrote one of the embroidery machine drivers for Linux.