I've used this a lot in the past for my embroidery projects, it's come so far from it's early days (and it was pretty good when it first came out). It's an incredible bit of software.
As a side note, it's amazing how versatile Inkscape is. I literally use the program to: design cookie cutters for printing, make embroidery designs, create laser cut patterns, and CNC Router cutouts. Just an incredible program.
So how ready is Ink/Stitch for an average consumer? My mom is recently retired and embroiders occasionally. I don't think she does anything more custom than a monogram. It was only a few years ago I pulled off old designs from floppy disks. I think her current equipment accepts USB but she leans on the cloud to get designs onto the machine. She's not geeky with computers, but is competent enough to use an iPad and used MS Office sweet when she was working.
Does it sound like this is something worth introducing her to?
If she's not doing anything more complicated than monograms, I'd honestly stick with using the downloaded/custom designs. As it sounds like she's just using those she'd have to learn two things. The first being inkscape, which like any graphics program is a decent challenge to learn. Then on top of that, she'd have to learn the embroidery specifics which is another challenge. Digitizing is just a whole level above using premade designs.
It's more a replacement for Hatch/Embrilliance than for brother.com's library of designs.
Is there a recommended way of using Inkscape to make it more user friendly?
I hear so much love for Inkscape but every time I've tried to use it for laser cutting or 2d design I give up and go back to Illustrator. I feel like I'm battling Inkscape to do even the most basic things. I'm a very casual/occasional user (of either program).
I'm happy using Gimp and Blender over Photoshop and Maya/Max for my home use cases but Inkscape is defeating me.
Have you checked out Affinity Designer? I'm a near 20+ year user of Illustrator and I find Inkscape 'a bit' of a mess, but Affinity's offering, whilst paid for (but cheap), is much more honed. I can't wait 'til I can transition over to it 100% and unshackle myself from Adobe (just not quite there yet, sadly).
+1 for Affinity Designer. I actually prefer it to Illustrator because it can do both vector and raster (they call it Designer and Pixel Personas). At $55 one-time price it's very reasonable.
From what I understand, they had experienced Illustrator users in mind when designing the interface. Same with Photoshop and Affinity Photo. It seems to have paid off.
I have pretty much the same problems on Linux, so I don't think it's an OS issue. Inkscape is one of those tools that I use often, and am very grateful for, but I usually find the actual experience of using it very painful. Regular crashes being one of the big pain points at the moment.
Both Ubuntu and Pop. In fairness, I think I've got it installed on Pop via Flatpak, which is sometimes part of the problem, but that's not the case on Ubuntu.
The amount of "trouble" highly depends on the kind of tools and skills you have. For some people just going away from workshop to use the computer in office can be more hassle than taking a piece of wood and shaping it directly. It's the same as machinists choosing manual mill for simple one off parts even when CNC mill is available. 3d printing is good for more complicated parts. Some comments suggest cnc router but simple part like that with the right set of woodworking tools could be made in a couple of minutes freehanding it or maybe using paper template glued to a piece of wood. Also maybe the 3d printer was busy printing the other more complex parts which actually benefit from it. Different tools have different advantages for different parts.
Looks like they could well have been CNC routed - if you turn them sideways they're a 2D design so it might be even easier than 3D printing them (and pretty!)
I think you're right, but as someone who owns both a 3d printer and a CNC router, just preparing toolpaths for the router is more work than the entire process of 3d printing.
Obviously they had a reason to make this choice, I just think I personally would have made a different one.
I suppose you're thinking about Jewish badges, but this one isn't a star of David (the points are too sharp to make equilateral triangles) and it's not yellow either, so I don't think there is any relation between them except for having six points.
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!).
Nice! I see that Inkscape has support for 'G-code' (which I am just learning about ...)
On a related topic, I'm looking into XY plotters to draw designs on paper - does anyone know the easiest or cheapest way to do that? Building it myself with a servo motor, an Arduino and a pen seems daunting.
Cool project-- however the #1 thing I'd expect to find on the homepage are some screenshots and a list of supported hardware (the embroidery machines) -- did I miss these or are they intentionally absent for some reason?
As a side note, it's amazing how versatile Inkscape is. I literally use the program to: design cookie cutters for printing, make embroidery designs, create laser cut patterns, and CNC Router cutouts. Just an incredible program.