Linus Torvalds, the famous embroidery file converter developer

http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2010/01/embroidery-gaah.html

86 10 2 years ago

torvalds-family.blogspot.com

vanderZwan• 2 years ago

Whee. Undocumented formats, bad firmware, lack of sane error messages. And did I mention crazy interfaces? The embroidery machine itself shows up as a USB storage device when you connect it, except it for some reason takes about half a minute to calm down enough to be mounted. And forget about the embroidery card reader/writer - that one needs some magic USB driver too.

Sounds like something that needs to be fixed by a few righteously spiteful open source developers, which is maybe a bit too on-the-nose given the author of the blog :)

prmoustache• 2 years ago

The irony being that this embroidery machine is probably using on a linux kernel.

joezydeco• 2 years ago

If you've seen one operate, they run incredibly fast with very precise stepper motor control. It's certainly not Linux at the lower level.

I dealt with Tajima machines back around 1999-2000 and I'm pretty sure the systems have just been step-evolved from that point onward. No Linux in sight.

marksbrown• 2 years ago

A developer, a wireshark installation & a great deal of patience later. Still, yet another argument for right to repair.

adra• 2 years ago

Title should include (2010)

alexdanilowicz• 2 years ago

That's my bad. Is there a list of rules somewhere? I didn't see anything mentioned about the year here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

I appreciate you calling it out!

JZL003• 2 years ago

Then it was taken up 7 years later and a bug fixed, found by afl. I wonder if it's in the kernel git so it was run automatically, or someone ran afl specifically on it

TacticalCoder• 2 years ago

BTW aren't old loom machines and the patterns they could do considered to be one of the oldest form of "programming"?

MattGrommes• 2 years ago

You haven't seen a weird file format until you've dealt with one of other embroidery formats, .dst. It's literally converted from an old paper tape format so it's like 21 bits per row, each bit indicates part of the length of the stitch so a 1 in place 0 means 1mm, place 1 means 3mm, then 9mm, -1, etc. The original format was holes in the tape and they just kept that idea for the past decades. You add all the 1s to see how long the stitch is. I had to write a converter in Go as my first Go project to integrate into a larger project and it was a trip.

manoweb• 2 years ago

Oh this is the Blog that Master Torvalds used before switching to Google+ !

Linus Torvalds, the famous embroidery file converter developer

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