For people like me who might be unfamiliar with the craft of digital cutting of vinyl, felt, and similar materials, here's a good article from the New York Times from a decade ago [1].

It summarizes three brands of machines: Pazzles, in Boisie, Idaho, Cricut from Provo Craft in Spanish Fork, Utah, and Silhouette, from Silhouette America in Lindon, Utah, at that time. I believe Pazzles ceased operation in 2020.

[1] For Crafters, the Gift of Automation, By Peter Wayner, Dec. 2, 2009

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/03/technology/personaltech/0...

I was in the market for a vinyl cutter/knife plotter a while back, and the fact I use linux on everything was my main reason for avoiding Cricut. Ended up finding out theres an open source inkscape plugin that interfaces with the silhouette brand of knife plotters.

Not having to use the proprietary jank software is so nice, its a value-add over the cricut just to not have to use their software.

you can plot & cut without the official software, using slicebug: https://github.com/XtremeCoder007/slicebug it took claude code 20 minutes to get it to run on macos, and he can even make cool designs for you.

I'd like to see some talk about alternatives.

I do crafting with an inkjet printer and something like the Cricut would be an interesting addition but I had two problems with it:

(i) the quality of work it does is not terrible but not great -- it's better than somebody who's bad with scissors but worse than somebody who's good with scissors.

(ii) when I was looking at it in 2021 they'd announced they were going to put limits on how many unique designs you could upload in a month, but the abandoned this after outcry: https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/18/22338801/cricut-crafting-...

Does the Cricut operate as an IoT device, or does it interface directly with a PC?

My understanding is that Wine doesn’t do any drivers or interface with any hardware.

Has the Cricut protocol been reverse engineered already? The primary motivation I had when building respira (controller software for the Brother PP-1 Skitch embroidery machine) was its shitty smartphone-only app. The reverse-engineering of the communication protocol was really doable with LLMs and the decompiled C++/C# code of the app. I can imagine something similar could be done with the Cricut machines.

The tooling is there in Inkscape (same for embroidery via InkStitch). AFAIK Silhouette plotters can be controlled via Inkscape plugins already.