the thread colors placed on individual spindles versus requiring human intervention to manually specify a correlation fig6 summarizes the flow of information and physical processes that occur during use of the thread spool sensing system note that microprocessor or other interface 661 represents the example hardware and software systems that may be used to act upon the digital signals that are transmitted or received here this item 661 may typically exist in the form of a dedicated microcontroller a general purpose personal computer or a combination of two or more such devices however any other device capable of accepting and generating digital signals as specified via basic software instructions could be used to implement the example methods and apparatus described herein fig6 also refers to telemetry information 667 which is data transmitted by an embroidery machine that indicates various aspects of its current state of operation typically embroidery machines are capable of digitally transmitting a wide variety of data for use or monitoring at another location for example on the screen of a nearby personal computer this data may include things like the number of stitches that remain to be sewn within the embroidery design currently being produced or if a sensor has detected that a thread break has occurred in addition to these types of data the machine may now also transmit the id numbers of thread spools that have been placed on the machine and when a thread spool is.