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...
I'm going to assume Claude did the heavy lifting here (because it's Q4 2026 and the odds are in my favor), so if I'm right: this is one of the best examples of the way LLMs can empower users to not only scratch all the itches, but demonstrate to anyone who stumbles by just how satisfying it can be to do so themselves.
Your app represents a future that I, an old, actually love. When I see projects like this, I don't think about ongoing support or if the project will be abandoned. I think, "Woah, I hadn't thought of that. Now I'm going to try it. Because why wouldn't I try to get all the value I can out of my $20/month Claude subscription?"
Even though I've been a developer for 30+ years (and a nerd for longer), I've never felt so motivated by the potential of a technology to make an individual's life richer. Thanks for sharing it.
And if you wrote it by hand, my hat's off to you for sharing that, too.
Claude seems to be backing out of doing this kind of thing. It didn't want to create a fake server so I could flash my camera. I argued with it about how where I live I have the legal right to do this. It agreed but still wouldn't do it.
Codex did it and flashed it in 1 minute.
I'm all for AI safety, but this sounds more like corpo preference safety to me.
The more people do stuff like this, the better. Subscription based e-waste is awful.
ChatGPT, but close! You're right, I likely wouldn't have approached the project if I had to write it all by hand. But it was fairly easy with AI, and I was impressed with the results. The days of personalized software are here. I built it exactly to my spec - similar to Adobe suite, and with built in MCP support.
The reverse engineering of the protocol was actually done with Claude Opus 4.8 last year. Source: me [0], but also noted in the source here and at least also in some separate file.
I get assuming that it's LLM-made, but why assume it's your specific model by a certain company? It's so weird to me when people bring up Claude as the 'default', although I get that those models are among the most popular right now.
I've said this before, but I'll say this again, but LLMs are the first time most people have used a computer as a computer. Myself included.
LLMs are realizing the potential of the computer revolution.
Those heady dreams of Xanadu, Xerox PARC, Douglas Engelbart, and Bret Victor today? They're finally possible.
Makes complete sense!
>Because why wouldn't I try to get all the value I can out of my $20/month Claude subscription?"
Or alternatively... why wouldn't the device OEM add support for <new feature> on <ancient garbage> if it's just a few tokens away.
>Even though I've been a developer for 30+ years (and a nerd for longer), I've never felt so motivated by the potential of a technology to make an individual's life richer. Thanks for sharing it.
Working in industry killed my desire to do any sort of computer stuff on the side. With AI handling the grunt work of setting up tooling and writing the bulk of the code I've started doing stuff again.
Imagine if RMS had access to Claude and wasn't activated by the need to modify printer software himself. We might not have the FSF, GNU, GPL, or anything downstream from those!
So how much would you pay to be able to do that? $30, 40, 100? Once they IPO, they'll find out exactly how much they can sell the same things back to you for.
It's cool, and it's nice to see people rebelling against the "hardware I bought held hostage to a subscription" business model, but if you use an AI to do this and don't understand what it's done, you've just traded one subscription dependency for another.
We have a proprietary rfid encoder with their software to make hotel room keys (BeLine Locks). It's bulky, and doesn't connect to PMS. Doesn't have any API. We learned how it works, and build our own little encoder software that provides API to make keys. Created a webapp that uses new API. Now, we can make keys from PMS. It may not save much time, but keys will be more accurate based on the reservation. And will be able to track who screwed up.
Another hotel uses different vendor locks with a different encoder. They don't also provide APIs or way to integrate. I just order a new encoder for that. Hopefully, we can figure that out too.
For anyone interested in this space, I'd also recommend looking at InkStitch[0], which is a plugin for InkScape. It allows you to take SVGs and export them into file types that an embroidery machine can use. It's not without its faults (there is a surprising amount of care needed for any design - stitch placement, size, type, layering, etc), but it's been a fun experience to take an SVG and turn it into something real.
I can also recommend Inkstitch. Sure you have to do a little manual love sometimes, but honestly, tweaks are needed a lot of the time in general.
Inkstich is the best option right now, but I can't wait to see the new possibilities now with AI. Inkstitch feels very disadvantaged by being a plugin, everything you do requires navigating multiple layers deep in the inkscape plugin menu.
A from scratch embroidery program could lift all of these options to the top layer UI where they belong, but understandably rebuilding the whole editor part is a lot of code.
If there's one thing I'm very optimistic about with AI, it's the de-bricking of bricked things, giving new life to legacy/unsupported software and hardware, or just getting around shitty practices like this.
Seems very promising. I have a home recording studio, and there's a small revolution going on with people cloning subscription-based stuff. Some brands are notorious for making expensive equipment which they just stop supporting after 10 years, sometimes rendering them obsolete. Or tacking ridiculous licensing mechanism onto the equipment.
> just getting around shitty practices like this
That is the hope; although we'll end up with either companies doubling down on cryptography to prevent this (though they will inevitably leave some holes), or changing business models, where the hardware loss leader -> subscription is no longer a thing, so hardware costs go up
William Osman built a browser app that works pretty well too: https://www.stitchslop.com/
I think that one was built with Claude (he wanted to embroider cats on merch, and didn't like the expensive subscription software's ancient UX).
What's next? My printer allowing me to use my own ink? OMG? It's the Wild West again, man.
A car that doesn't start making false corrections to my steering that I can't perma disable, Santa.
I actually went on a deep dive when I encountered this project a few weeks ago.
It seems a lot of the magic comes from Respira (https://github.com/jhbruhn/respira), there were already open source softwares to avoid using the subscription app.
Also the $300 price was probably secondhand/on sale because that machine is usually 499, not 300.
Still a cool project, but you'd think this was reverse engineered from scratch from the description whereas this is more like a downloader wrapping yt-dlp
Maybe I'm missing something, but this repo seems to be 2 days old so you cannot have encountered it a few weeks ago. There were perhaps a few short form videos showing the project in development, but that seems a bit shallow for a deep dive into the specifics of where the magic comes from.
It's available for $303 right now on amazon. I also reverse engineered the protocol from scratch using PacketLogger. It looks like my agent also used Respira to verify the implementation. With that said, the entire app was built with AI.
This is a perfect example. I think the subscription era is going to end as software becomes bespoke.
I ran into the same problem and made something similar, but I ended up writing what is basically a server that can be driven by any thin client. The goal being I can start designs by either a simple prompt, or create a mobile/tablet client that has the same power as desktop applications.
In addition to the digitizer, I am building my own set of heuristics that give designs a "better" outcome but things are really a work in progress right now.
Embroidery is a really fun hobby for me so i'm basically optimizing for "what I need" as I learn more about it!
I'm tired of everything needing a subscription.
Life was better before the internet which allowed companies to remotely put their hands in our pockets.
Was it better? I remember having to pay a lot for major version upgrades, most of which were focused on new features to attract new customers rather than improving existing features for people who had already paid.
I was literally shocked to see the prices of embroidery software. And not to mention the user interfaces, like they are stuck in the 90s!
I’ve been using InkStitch, but learning vector graphics for non-technical people is not user friendly. An upcoming app that is quite promising is StitchPencil, developer by a German engineer. Looks solid!
Btw I believe nowadays you can easily let Claude build you software that replaces the subscription entirely.
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.
> We ended up booking a booth at an embroidery roadshow to show our work and unfortunately things fizzled out
So you're saying you put a pin in it?
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!
If you give it a try, let me know! Would love to see how it works for you.
Super cool, but I wish you said both what your $300 machine is and also what machines this is compatible with somewhere very clear.
Brother Skitch PP1, from the research I did when I saw the initial tweet.
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.
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?
It works with most machines and exports to a variety of formats. Most embroidery machines you connect a usb drive to. The specific machine I used, the Brother PP1, allows you to connect over bluetooth.
The Status section on the github page says:
> Not yet run against a real Skitch.
So it possibly doesn't work on anything.
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)
Then JLCPCB with matching original form factor PCB is just one prompt away, driving a couple of stepper motor is a solved problem…
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.
I wonder if anyone has done this to the Cricut machines yet
I was just thinking the same thing.
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 :)
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.
Interesting. I have been having fun working on "NewHat" for a while - meant for Toyota/Tajima machines. https://github.com/wjkennedy/NewHat/blob/feature/model-train...
I used to use the Melco and Pantagrams digitizing software and operated kiosks doing custom embroidery.
People always asked "can I get anything on a hat?" The reasons I said no before no longer exist.
Punching out a DST is not the same as clean sewouts and NewHat attempts some machine emulation and classification of generated designs. They're virtually sewn and ranked for some reinforcement learning.
This is great! Would love to see something like this for Cricut.
Same, seeing this has me thinking...
Cricut's software is such a bloated and dysfunctional steaming pile of garbage but the machine itself seems well built.
Love to see it OP! I would love to try this out.
I'm curious, how do you make sure that the embroidery files are valid of the file type (.exp) for example, and that B) things aren't done in such a way that cause the needle to break, stiches to overlap too much, etc etc that would otherwise harm a machine that reads the file?
Every format is written from the same list of stitch commands using byte layouts from pyembroidery. For machine safety, the defaults use standard densities and stitch lengths. There’s also a density map that shows where stitches pile up. If you give it a try and experience any problems, create a GH Issue and i'll look into it!
Years ago I ran across another project doing similar. Embroidermodder.
https://www.libembroidery.org/
Always room for another though.
This is a really cool use case for AI coding. Well done
What’s the Embroidery machine name and model this was built for?
I want this but for printer firmware
We're going to see more of this. Like the guy that made the custom Mac print driver. Most companies put zero effort into making sure things like this aren't homebrew hackable.
We should kill subscription models with LLMs app by app (and possibly server by server) until hardware is sold as standalone hardware with no strings attached. I don't care if this slows down r&d or makes printers more expensive. Hardware vendors have abused the subscription model to a point that they can't be trusted with it.
I'd love a replacement for Cricut's software. You don't need a subscription for it but a few features are locked behind a subscription, and they nag a lot, and it's just so bad.
I think they initially sold this machine at a loss because of the subscription, and now they sell it even lower because people really don't want their hardware locked into a subscription.
Well, you did build part of it (and, technically, claude did that), but the groundwork was the existing respira by someone else.
So.. eh.
I mean it's cool and all, and at least claude did do proper attribution in the code, but your post kinda does not and neither does the readme.
That's not exactly in spirit of FOSS.
I love this, this is the sort of work we want LLMs to do. Sewing machines are the physical manifestation of computing, weaving inspired punchcard creation and it's nice to see it come full circle. A smart stitch in time saves nine.
You missed a good opportunity to name your software Sister as a play on Brother
very cool, thanks for sharing.
what machine would you recommend to someone looking to get into this as a hobby?
I went with the Brother Skitch PP1. It's right around $300 on amazon. It has sub-par reviews, but I realized that most of those were because of the poorly built software and subscription fee. So far, it has worked really well for me! Edit: here is a video/image of a patch I made: https://x.com/simpsoka/status/2115254318161182876
The supplied software is truly terrible.
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Please don't post snark on HN. This is the opposite of what we're trying for here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html