As the world gets smaller and electronic memory gets bigger and more affordable, buying a USB with an enormous memory for your embroidery machine can be very tempting. Working with the theory that saving every design that you own on one big USB stick will mean that you wont have to fight with your computer again may seam ideal, but…consider this. In order to choose an embroidery design from that stick, all of the designs have to be processed and represented on your embroidery machine in the form of a Thumbnail image. To do this, the tiny memory of your embroidery machine has to read every design on the stick, and then check the full extent of the USB stick to make sure that it didn’t miss anything. If you have a stick which has a very large memory, your embroidery machine effectively can’t read all of it, and not knowing what to do in this circumstance, it will either sit in its safety mode and not do anything, or shut down completely.
What does this mean? USB sticks used on almost all embroidery machines should be no bigger than 2 GIG (gigabytes). Two or three years ago, this was the normal size for a USB stick. Now 8, 16 or even 32 GIG sticks are the norm, and tiny 2 GIG sticks are getting expensive and very hard to come by, causing embroidery machine owners some concern. At Sew This & That, sharing our customer’s frustration in not being able to get our hands on this important small-size USB stick, we have sourced our own! Tested on Brother, Janome, Bernina, Husqvarna and Pfaff embroidery machines; we’ve imported purple 2 GIG USB sticks with our logo on them – and are selling them at just $10 each.
