Show HN: My $300 embroidery machine needed a subscription, so I built my own app

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.

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 have theorized for a couple of years that an embroidery machine might make a cheap tactile graphics device for blind people. This might make it a lot more feasible. Thanks!

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.

[0] https://inkstitch.org/

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.

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.

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.

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

Should really have used Zig instead of Rust.

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!

https://studio.embroiderytext.com/

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'm tired of everything needing a subscription.

Life was better before the internet which allowed companies to remotely put their hands in our pockets.

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.

This is a perfect example. I think the subscription era is going to end as software becomes bespoke.

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 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 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.

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'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

This is great! Would love to see something like this for Cricut.

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

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?

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.

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.

https://github.com/jhbruhn/respira

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?

The supplied software is truly terrible.

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