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...