It was my objective for this year to make a computer control embroidery machine, and almost on software side i have 100% success... The rest is interfacing the hardware with a Normal low-cost sewing machine, that is a piece of Cake for me...
Actually, Anybody who knows embroidery, knows that the software used for embroidery stuff is not producing Gcode like we are using for our CNC MAchines..Each vendor has specialised embroidery formates and they are very hard coded (I know well)...
The Following are the few Formates that Embroidery machine uses..
Brother *.pes
Tajima *.dst
Viking *.hus
Melco *.exp etc
Okay, so what i did is made a software (I am a Visual Basic Programmer) that generate a Gcode not only for embroidery but also for Quilting machines... and By Embroidery means a real embroidery Gcode including all types of stitches a commercial embroidery machine can make......
The following images represents a sample of the Lady in Sophiesew program...I exported in DST format..and generated Gcode... The output is Perfect in NCPLOT...
Now we can say that we are able to perform embroidery work with our Mach3 /EMC/Kcam controlled CNC...
For setails about the efforts i have made you can see the thread at CNCZone..This thread is almost 0ne year Old, but the last couple of weeks were very productive... Read from Page No.12 upto page No. 13 and you will see How close we are for a very very low cost CNC Embroidery Machine..
http://www.cnczone.com/forums/showth...=57404&page=12