Computer-Controlled Embroidery Machines?

Togashi Heiwa asks: "I've been looking at doing some embroidery for a project I am working on (I do costumes for LRPGs, etc.), and wanted to try a computer-controlled embroidery machine. This way, I could do uniform insignias, etc. without being limited to the collection of cartoon characters & flowers that come with most machines. A brief search on the subject turns up several machines or apps that do this, but they have varying formats, and I'd like to get a technical review, as opposed to just a typical home user. Anyone have any experience with embroidery software and hardware?"

Comments

An additional question

[elmegil]

I've been looking for either 1) a free/cheap means to convert between the typical formats for the files that drive the computer embroidery (.pes is the format I have, I want it in jpg or gif) or 2) a format definition for .pes so I can roll my own coversion.

I've done a lot of searching and all I seem to be able to find are $900 packages that do it all and sing too. Absolutely no luck with the format definition, only pages that say essentially ".pes is a format for computer embroidery". Big help....

You are not alone

[JabberWokky]

I've sat with about 15 or so people who could afford one and wanted one, but were stymied by the fact that we had no way of getting past the marketspeak and were loath to drop the money on a non-quantifiable and non-open system.

Imagine being able to load up an xcf image of the Denton High path (from Brad Majors in RHPS) or a couple gifs of Tank Police insignia and just kick it to CUPS. Now that would be beautiful.

It's an occasional topic at convention costuming panels, and the convention wisdom is "they are great, but only if you want Garfield or flowers". It's a shame, really.

--
Evan

Computing Comes Full Circle

[bluethundr]

Interesting, this story reminded me of the Jacquard Loom. The Jacquard Loom used punch cards to control the designs it embroidered into clothing material.

Herman Hollerith was hired to automate the 1890 US Census because it was apparent that information processing techniques simply weren't keeping up with the burgeoning US population. When it came time to do the 1890 census, they weren't yet finished processing teh previous census.

When Hollerith encountered the Jacquard loom and realized the significance of its punch card method he realized that he had stumbled on a method for automating the input of information for later processing.

He then took his information processing techniques and founded the Hollerith Corporation. This company later underwent a name change and eventually came to dominate in the computing field.

Re:Computing Comes Full Circle

[A. Craig West]

Those Jacquard Looms are REALLY impressive pieces of machinery. Some of my customers still use them. They tend to have a paper tape that is probably 30cm across (I suspect exactly a foot, in primitive units...) and the machine reads the tape mechanically with a set of metal fingers to detect the holes in the tape. I have seen some of these equipped with a slightly more modern computer interface where the machine has a hardware device fitted which emulates the paper tape, but is connected to a computer.

More modern industrial embroidery machines have a standard 1" paper tape, although even those are getting hard to find. Most embroidery machines now caught up to double-density 3.5" floppy disks. The files on the disk are usually just a byte-dump of the contents of one of the paper tapes, though.

Computer embroidery

[A. Craig West]

It happens that my job is writing software for controlling these machines, and for making the designs, as well. Unfortunately for your purposes, I am mostly familiar with the industrial versions of the machines, which don't use the same file formats as the home machines.

The first thing you need to know is that the process of converting from an image file to an embroidery file is a lot more complicated than you would think, and requires a human being to do a lot of it if you want anything like a good result. Most conversion programs you will find will convert between the embroidery formats, but are fairly useless for conversions to and from image files.

Ann The Gran is a site that is oriented at the home market you seem to be in, and it has a fair amount of useful information and programs you can buy.
Amazing Designs Also has software that may be of use to you, including auto-digitizing software, which sounds like the feature you need. There are other sites as well, I just mentioned these because they sell some of the software I work on, so I don't really have an unbiased opinion of them.

If you are serious about trying to generate your own files, Wotsit has a partial description of the format for PES files, which is what you mentioned you have. That description is not sufficient for you to do anything with, but if you look further up the page to the description of Melco files, which is one of the industrial formats I am more familiar with, is somewhat more useful. The Melco description is also incomplete, but does contain enough information to create a complete functional embroidery design, and there are certainly programs available which will allow you to convert from melco to PES and back.

I don't really recommend this approach, because it is a LOT harder than it looks, and even after you understand how the files work, you have not even begun to understand the best way to actually generate a design to sew on the machine. I've been working full time on this type of software for over ten years and have only learned the rudiments of 'punching', which is the term for creating embroidery designs. On the other hand, I've never really been that interested in punching, either. Creating software which allows others to 'punch' has kept me busy enougn...

The term 'punching', by the way, is a leftover from the days when the embroidery machines read their stitch data directly from a paper tape, and the designs were created by punching the holes directly on the paper tape. I'm one of the few people I know who can read the tapes by eye... It's not a particularly useful skill now.