I’m Max Pallotto. I’m an electromechanical technician and I run a software company. In between, I ride my bike, invent odd things and fix whatever I can. When my backpack tore, I learned to sew so I could make it better than new, and then to embroider.

My embroidery machine is a Janome MC500e. It’s a great machine, and it has no WiFi. Testing a design meant walking a USB stick between the computer and the machine, over and over, until one day I’d had enough. That was the start of WiFiDrive: I coded and debugged until it was something I could trust.

A few days later I tried it on a Haas VF-1 in the shop of a friend who’s in on my crazy ideas. It worked, and I never got the stick back. Word got around, and people started asking me for one. It’s a problem nobody has solved well: lots of friction, lots of trouble, and you had to be a hacker to build a Raspberry Pi that more or less worked.

So after testing and polishing it, I’m sharing it, hoping it solves for you the same problem it solved for me.