My wife just got an embroidery machine. I've been meaning to look into this. As someone who has written their own g-code interpreters for their custom robots, what am I getting into?
It sounds simple at first blush, but there is a leap of creativity+skill from "this machine can run this pre-made design" to "digitizing arbitrary designs"
There is a lot of nuance in the angle of the stitch, the type of thread, the patterns in satin fill stitching, underfill amount, etc. And then you need to watch out about the materials your stitching into, making sure things arn't stretched, distorted, or you use the right backing to hold it in place, etc.
Dabble your toes in the plethora of professionally designed stitches, so you can see what they look like. The pre-made designs are just lists of x/y coordinates and stitch/cut commands. Keep in mind that this limits the amount you can size up or size down a design: most software won't add/remove stitches to scale it properly.
Ink/Stitch can get around the resize problem by working with with vector/SVG as the source data, and rendering the stitch plan once you've sized things the way you want. It can also import most of the pre-made stitches (.pes, .vp3, etc) into Inkscape as a manual stitch plan, which is just a path with some flags in the xml, and then you can cut out parts of the stitch, or add additional parts.
Last time I checked (a long time ago, admittedly) most embroidery solutions were locked-in and opaque. It's a vastly different world to home-built CNCs running off GCode (sadly!).
