Support the project

What sits behind the "generate" button

From the outside gooblen.ro does something simple: you hand it a photo and it hands you a chart. The hard part is that it does not convert pixels into squares. For every colour in your photograph it looks for the closest real thread. Not mathematically closest, but the one your eye reads as the same colour, which is an entirely different and far uglier problem.

Thread does not come in every shade. It comes in fixed palettes, printed on cards, with nothing in between. So the generator has to pick, out of a closed set, the few dozen threads that make your photograph look best once stitched. That choice is written from scratch, and it is the part that took the most work.

23 400

lines of code written

79

automated tests

52

thread brands catalogued

12 355

thread colours, with their codes

The 52 palettes are not a list downloaded from somewhere. Each was checked as a real product, actually on sale, under its manufacturer's correct name. Several were thrown out along the way once they turned out to be something other than they claimed, and others were renamed after it became clear their names had been wrong for years.

What it costs

Every chart costs processor time, and some of them cost a good deal of it. Not in some abstract cloud: on a rented machine that runs day and night and is paid for monthly, whether anybody generates anything or not.

Next to it comes storage for the archives, because a kit runs between 10 and 30 megabytes and has to wait a fortnight for you to download it. Plus the domain, renewed every year since that story back in 2021.

None of it is life-changing money. But it is not nothing either, and so far it has come out of my own pocket, which is fine and can stay that way.

What you get for donating

Nothing. Genuinely nothing: no extra features, no better charts, no skipping the queue. Everything the site does is already yours and stays that way, whether you give a euro or never give anything at all.

That is not modesty, it is how this thing is built. The moment something sat behind a payment, gooblen.ro would become a shop, and I would owe you a different kind of relationship. I prefer this one.

If it has been useful and you would like to help, the button is alongside. If not, go and stitch; that is exactly as good an outcome.