Brother’s website for sewing machines is frustratingly limited – no proper catalog and terrible filters. When I wanted to check which models had a specific function, their filter only offered two options (knee lifter and built-in quilting stitches). Not helpful at all.
But then I discovered support.brother.com has all their manuals online. Perfect – I could scrape every sewing machine PDF manual and search through them myself.
Will LLM Work?
Since AI and LLMs are trending (and I’m lazy), I first tried Google Gemini 1.5 Pro with Deep Research. This tool takes your prompt and turns it into a search plan, gathering info from the web. Here’s the prompt I used:
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https://support.brother.com/g/b/productseries.aspx?c=us&lang=en&content=ml&pcatid=36 From this brother sewing machine manual website, download all the operation manuals and determine if they have “thread cutter button” in that model, and then generate a table for all the model that has the thread cutter button |
It gives the following plan:
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Find Sewing Machines with Thread Cutter – Research Websites From this brother sewing machine manual website, download all the operation manuals and determine if they have “thread cutter button” in that model, and then generate a table for all the model that has the thread cutter button (1) Find all the operation manuals on the given website. (2) Download all the operation manuals. (3) For each manual, search for the term “thread cutter button”. (4) If the term is found, add the model name to a list. (5) Generate a table with the following columns: Model Name, Has Thread Cutter Button (Yes/No). (6) Populate the table with the information gathered in steps 4 and 5. – Analyze Results – Create Report – Ready in a few mins |
The results were disappointing – Gemini only found seven models with thread cutters:
Model Name Has Thread Cutter Button
FS200CE Yes FS250ME Yes PQ1600S YesInnov-is A65 YesInnov-is F560 Yes Innov-is NV1800Q Yes Innov-is VQ2 Yes
Fallback To Scrape and Grep
I did know what I should do – scrape the page, use XPath to get all model support URLs, navigate to each page, extract the manual links, and download the PDFs.
The web structure was tricky. On desktop, clicking a series with multiple models triggers a selection dialog. Initially, I thought I’d need to handle that complexity. But when I saw the mobile width view showing a flat list of models, I realized all the links were already in the HTML – making them easy to scrape with XPath.
So I spent some time to: analyzed the structure, wrote the scraper (with Claude helping generate XPath selectors), fixed exceptions as they came up, and kept at it until I had all the manuals.
Finally, I used pdfgrep with some Unix tools to search for thread cutter features. Claude helped pipe together the right commands:
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pdfgrep –e ‘“Thread Cutter” button’ –e “Thread cutter button” \ manuals/*.pdf > matches awk –F: ‘NR>1 {print $1}’ matches | uniq | \ sed ‘s|manuals/||’ | sed ‘s|.pdf||’ |
Here we go, now I got all the models that have the exact function I want!
Code has been published at: https://github.com/mlouielu/brother-sewing-machine-manuals
And the only problem that I left is, I don’t have enough fund to buy any of them : (
List of Brother sewing machine that has dedicate “thread cutter button”
- CS-8060
- CS-80
- CS-8150
- DZ820E
- EV1-LE
- EV1
- HE-120
- HE1
- HE-240
- Innov-is 1000
- Innov-is 1200
- Innov-is 1250D
- Innov-is 1500D-1500
- Innov-is 2500D
- Innov-is 2800D
- Innov-is 4000D-4000
- Innov-is 4500D
- Innov-is 4750D
- Innov-is 500D
- Innov-is 6000D
- Innov-is 6700D
- Innov-is 6750D
- Innov-is 900D
- Innov-is 950D
- Innov-is 990D
- Innov-is BP1400E
- Innov-is BP2100
- Innov-is BP2150L
- Innov-is BP3500D
- Innov-is BQ1350
- Innov-is BQ2450
- Innov-is BQ2500
- Innov-is BQ3050
- Innov-is BQ3100
- Innov-is BQ950
- Innov-is NQ1300PRW- Innov-is NQ1300
- Innov-is NQ1400E
- Innov-is NQ1600E
- Innov-is NQ1700E
- Innov-is NQ3500D
- Innov-is NQ3550W
- Innov-is NQ3600D
- Innov-is NQ3700D
- Innov-is NQ550PRW – Innov-is NQ550
- Innov-is NQ575PRW – Innov-is NQ575
- Innov-is NQ700PRW- Innov-is NQ700
- Innov-is NQ900PRW- Innov-is NQ900
- Innov-is NS1150E
- Innov-is NS1250E
- Innov-is NS1750D
- Innov-is NS1850D
- Innov-is NS2750D
- Innov-is NS2850D
- Innov-is PS500
- Innov-is PS700
- Innov-is VE2200
- Innov-is VE2300
- Innov-is VM5100
- Innov-is VM5200
- Innov-is VM6200D
- Innov-is VQ2400
- Innov-is VQ3000
- Innov-is XE1
- Innov-is XE2
- Innov-is XJ1
- Innov-is XJ2
- Innov-is XP1
- Innov-is XP2
- Innov-is XP3
- Innov-is XV8500D
- Innov-is XV8550D
- LB5000
- LB5500
- LB6770-6770PRW
- LB-6800
- LB7000
- NX-400Q-400
- NX-450-450Q
- NX570Q
- NX-600
- NX-650Q
- PC-420-420PRW
- PC-6500
- PE500
- PE525
- PE535
- PE540D
- PE545
- PE550D
- PE570
- PE-700-750D
- PE-700II-750D(USB)
- PE-770
- PE-780D
- PE800
- PE900
- PP1
- QC-1000
- SB3129
- SB3150
- SB4138
- SB7050E
- SB7500
- SB7900E
- SB8000
- SE1800
- SE1900
- SE1950
- SE2000
- SE-270D
- SE-350
- SE-400
- SE425
- SE600
- SE625
- SE630
- SE700
- SE725
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