Embroidery Machine

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Revision as of 12:49, 17 December 2016 by Miloh (talk | contribs) (→‎making images)
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We have an embroidery machine! It's a Brother SE400.

Brother SE400

manual

[Download the manual][www.brother-usa.com/ModelDocuments/Consumer/Users Manual/UM_SE_400_EN_2327.PDF].

tips

Make sure the fabric is very tensed (Brother actually recommends to use a stabilizer product). You may want to loose the upper thread (setting it on 2 seems to work well).

making images

In order to embroider, you need to obtain a .pes file. This is a proprietary file format used by Brother machines. It's a vector format that includes individual stitches, thread colors, etc etc. There are some github projects that work with .pes files.

We've been using SewArt, which costs money, but has a 30-day free trial. The trial has enough features to do this, to the point where I'm not sure anyone will buy it. It's windows-only, but you can download free windows 10 isos or virtual machine images nowadays.

To import images, File > Open a normal image file. Tools > Resize to make it fit the embroidery size (supposedly 4" by 4" ~= 100m by 100m, but I think it's a little smaller than that). Then Tools > Convert to stitches to create stitch information. There's a lot of options here, but probably what you want is "Auto-sew Image" in the top right, then "Set Transparent Color" to avoid stitching a whole background. Finally Save As to generate the .pes file.

putting images on the machine

Plug in the USB cable to a computer. You'll be able to mount it as a disk. Move the .pes file onto the disk. I think you can unmount and unplug it at this point, but I'm not sure.

making it go

Get to the main interface on the LCD screen, click (it's a touch screen) the icon with the USB symbol, and click your image. Then click the weird icon above it (?) , thread the machine with the first color, lower the head, and press the down-facing green arrow button on the machine.

It will stop once it finishes the first color to allow you to thread the second color, if there are multiple colors.

The thread may break. Rethread it and it will keep going. We've found that turning the tension dial up to 5ish is best for thick fabric.

example files

(We can't upload .pes files to this wiki so these are .dat files, change the extension from .pes.dat to .pes to use them)