Linus's software is installed on all the computers of my house so that preview of .pes files works everywhere. It is not as pretty as commercial software's preview. Does someone have an improved fork ? How commercial software achieve to give volume feeling to their embroidery previews ?
Finally...someone took the time to do something I'm much too lazy to do myself. Mom's all into embroidery and I want the GD dancing bears on the back of one of my hats but all the free software kind of sucks/is abandoned.
I do have some ideas for a fill algorithm based on origami complex fold rule thingies that I think would be interesting, especially the curved folding algorithm[0]. I also think the 6(?) folding rules would be a good start for laying down the fill paths following the outline of complex shapes.
Perhaps someday I'll explore this, depends on how bad I want the dancing bears I suppose...
Some photos of real life output of this process would be a good addition to the page.
I'm kind of vaguely intrigued by the whole idea, but unlikely to run out and buy a machine. Some photos that show what's possible could tip me over the edge.
The manufacturer has some photos on their site where you can buy e.g. Toy Story patterns, but a) they're not created via this software, b) they don't actually show you them on a backpack or whatever in real life, just the design.
The SE400 isn't bad but the hoop size is a bit limiting. Beware that Brother intentionally slows down its cheaper machines but they are still quite usable. They also intentionally limit the clearance under the arm of their cheaper machines which can be frustrating with conventional sewing.
I would recommend picking up an "obsolete" home embroidery machine. Models that were top of the line 10+ years ago can be had for a steal and most have seen little use. That will require sacrificing USB connectivity but you can get a more capable machine in the end.
I have actually done a number of sweatshirts for my family and friends with this and it's a pretty great machine. If you've never done embroidery and want to start with a cheap and capable machine, I can vouch for this one. It's also a pretty solid sewing machine that I use a lot for fixing my kid's clothes or working on Halloween costumes, etc.
I've been personally using the SewArt software (paid $75) with Wine emulator on my Mac and it miraculously works. I'm looking forward to trying out this Inkscape extension, the SewArt stuff is hilariously bad while simultaneously being one of the most expensive software licenses on my computer.
Fun fact, this machine has 476KB (kilobytes!!) of memory to hold these designs, which is smaller than I thought possible for consumer hardware in this day. How do you outfit a machine with a USB connector and then put 400k of memory on it? Also fun, your PES file sizes can't be more than around 40k.
Does this tool work with some embroidery machine? In other words, can we think of "shareable" designs that people can exchange and embroider their own clothes from a local machine, only by using Inkscape?
lexelby addresses the question, "why not just use Embroidermodder?":
"In theory, this project was going to be exactly what I wanted. In practice, it never got funded on Kickstarter and it’s largely incomplete."
lexelby also describes what exactly was used from the Embroidermodder2 project:
"...it contains a really awesome core library that knows pretty much every machine embroidery format and how to convert between them. I use it to convert the CSV files that ink/stitch outputs into the PES files..."
This is tangentially interesting for me, because in one of my pursuits, I want to fabricate a little over a hundred, uniquely-worded "Remove Before Flight"-style-streamers [1], and would continue to create them at a constant, reduced frequency after the initial run. The custom embroidery industry doesn't seem to cater to that kind of use case; all the vendors I visited online want multiple orders per design, and have high setup costs per design.
That made it expensive enough that it is worth it to me to purchase an entry-level embroidery machine like the Brother SE400 and have at it myself with the built-in fonts. But ink/stitch seems ideal if I ever extend my use case (which is just crank out some sans serif text with blaze orange orange thread onto some thick black fabric) in the future to include some simple graphics. Learning to re-hoop (since most of my streamers will be a foot or longer) seems tricky, though.
I remember Linus writing a blog post about this exact problem. Seems it was in 2010.
http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2010/01/embroidery-gaah....