Hi @3dsman,
This thread can be dedicated to OpenEmbroidery to keep it distinct from the discussion about
I love what you’re doing, it’s a fantastic project. I know that you and your technical partner have the expertise to complete your project. By making the following suggestions for introductions I merely would like to help you discuss your project with others.
If you’d like to contact Josh Varga in order to understand more about Embroidermodder please let me know and I will make an introduction via email.
If you’d like to contact Windell and Lenore of EvilMadScientist please let me know and I’ll make an introduction via email. Lenore and Windell are the creators of AxiDraw. In addition, Windell is a contributor to the open source All Yarns are Beautiful project which develops knitting design software and circuitry control boards to communicate with the Brother knitting machines. They may understand some of the issues you are encountering with your embroidery design software, control circuitry & embedded software, and CNC hardware.
Very cool contacts
I think we must release a first version before contact those persons.
We talked about it today and we planned to work on the 2 most important things to make it usable: windows compilation and embroidery format export function.
I will make some demo videos too (in french I think, may be with english subtitles)
The goal is to publish a first sourcecode and find some betatester and advises (we never used commercial software so maybe we missed some things)
The hardware is mostly functionnal, we just have to make a new control card and associated firmware.
There’s also the machine speed control that we have to work on.
It this a thing yet and if so does anyone know how to use it?
I need my logo designed into an embroidery machine file and i have ZERO idea how this stuff works lol
We try to make an easy to use embroidery design software. Our goal is to reduce the barrier to entry into the embroidery art.
Some members of the electrolab hackerspace (where we develop it) have learn to use our pre-version which have no user interface and only works with keyboard shortcuts and they were able to make their first design within 20mn.
Obviously, like any artistic work it needs more training and tests to understand how fabric reacts and adapt our designs. However basic stuff can be made pretty quickly.
@3dsman, one option that you should look into is setting up a Patreon/etc. account, where people can sponsor on a ‘per feature’ and/or ‘per month’ basis (based on a ‘ranked voting’ system to determine which of the dozens of features are most important to the most people and offering a half-dozen or so at a time), so that once enough money is available, you can either offer a bounty or just pay someone to develop that feature. That way, those who really want a particular feature can vote with their wallets. Obviously, this is just brainstorming and there would be a fair number of issues to sort through, but it should accelerate development while engaging users in the process who can’t help with coding/etc.
Previous attempt of crowdfunding show us the users are not ready to pay for this kind of software (embroider modder2 fail). I don’t think there is enough interested users to make successful crowdfunding.
This can change with cheaper ans easier hardware embroidery solutions (we’re work on it ;-))
Opensource development is a militant act and only very important and used projects can work on a paid basis.
Anyway there is a lot of things to do to help those projects, no need to be a developer: tutorials, opensource assets, translations, website or just talk about it around you.
Some projects can be helped by money too (mostly for web hosting), this is not our case for the moment (very few visitors on the website, we can handle).
It is a pity that your project in the creation and collection of training materials hasn’t been developed. I purchased Janome MB-4S and still don’t understand some functions of it. I searched for videos and articles, but not all answers are given there …
I think we must release a first version before contact those persons.