Brotherlink 7 USB, one step further

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On the main BL7USB page you can read the basic functionality of the Brotherlink 7 USB and the driver program FB100 Utility. The intended functionality of Brotherlink 7 USB is to enable users to make backups of their FB100 floppies and to restore these backups in case of failure of the original floppy. On top of that, the driver program FB100 Utility provides facilities to show the patterns that are on a floppy using the real estate of your computer. Patterns can be shown individually on screen or as a catalog that you can print for future reference.

Users wouldn't be users if they wouldn't come up with suggestions to extend the above functionality and not only make backups of their floppies, but also have facilities to manipulate these backups.

Now the contents of the FB100 floppies is stored on your computer, it opens up the possibility to organise and maintain these backups. The maintenance was already partially implemented in the Extract functionality where you can extract patterns from a Brother Pattern Disk file and store the designs as DesignaKnit PAT files on your computer. The reverse direction, export PAT files to a Brother Pattern Disk file, was not intended functionality as we expected DesignaKnit users to use DesignaKnit to download patterns to their knitting machine.

The expectation that DesignaKnit users use download appeared to be a bit overoptimistic. And worse, there are also machine knitters out there who have software other than DesignaKnit to create patterns like Cochenille Stitch Painter or Passap Creation, to name a couple. To accommodate ALL users, it has been decided to take the functionality of FB100 Utility one step further and add functions to add and delete patterns to and from a track. Obviously, add and delete track are part of the new functionality too.

As a result, the majority of greyed out buttons in FB100 Utility are now enabled and you can add and delete tracks, add and delete patterns and save (modified) Brother Pattern Disk files on your computer with or without changing the name of the Brother Pattern Disk file.

The pattern formats supported can be found in the table below:

Extension		Description
PAT		DesignaKnit pattern file
BPT		Brother PaTtern file
CST		CompuStrick pattern file
CUT		Passap Creation pattern file
PCX		System 90 INTO SHAPE pattern file
STC		Stitch Painter pattern file
SBR		Stitch Painter brush file
DAT		Silver Reed PC10 pattern file

You can add above formats in any combination to a track. FB100 utility will take care of the conversion to Brother Pattern Disk format.

Existing users can obtain this new version free of charge by downloading the new version.