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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I think they didn't intend for the bluetooth protocol to be reverse engineered. The free version of the software you really can't do much (limited colors, tools). I believe they also have some clip-art that they make available with the subscription. It's pretty bad.
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.
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!
Also don't forget Linus him self wrote one of the embroidery machine drivers for Linux.
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.
https://www.libembroidery.org/
Always room for another though.
what machine would you recommend to someone looking to get into this as a hobby?
What benefits (if any) does the subscription offer?