 So we now have up next we have Sarah Spencer who's going to be talking to us about her fantastic Machine knitting and I think it's now an easy to say internet famous tapestry that she has here at EMF for us Good morning everyone. Thanks for coming along emf has been yeah close to my heart for a few years now I went to our emf 2014 and I've been in love with it ever since Now that this particular talk I've actually had to cut it down a little bit It was originally a 45 minute talk. So my apologies if I rush through a few things here and there mostly the The visible needed universe tapestry is actually right at the end of the talk So I really want to just get along to that because I think a lot of you also want to hear about that as well But most of the talk is is actually about the technology that that made made the tapestry All right, so let's get started I Hacked a domestic knitting machine for the 1980s and I turned it into a network printer I know that sounds completely ridiculous and you're probably used to that after a couple of days here at EMF But bear with me and I hope I will have convinced you that that's exactly what I did, but Happy to hear from the audience how you think I went Right, so how do I define anything network printer? So it needs to accept an image from my computer over the network with more than two colors in any single row So me personally, I'm not a big fan of black and white printing. I like to print I like to print in color And it can hit hands-free Mostly So this is a really old piece of tech comes from the 1980s. It's It's interesting to you to try and modify and there's certainly and young itself is quite a fuzzy material to work with So things don't always go according to plan, which is why I'm like, okay Well, it's it mostly does what I claim that it does Right so chapter one standing on giant Who here has actually seen a knitting printer, sorry, it's a knitting machine Oh a good chunk of the audience. I want to say about 40% roughly, which is fantastic. How about in real life? Have you seen one in real life? Excellent here about 35% which is so fantastic So I don't need to spend too much time right now on I'm going through the the technicals But basically this image shows you what a knitting machine actually looks like We've got like a bed of needles So, you know traditional knitting needles you have two needles and you pass the knitting from one needle to the next You turn around you pass it back again, and that's knitting on this machine However, it has one needle per knit So that zoomed in graphic that you can see with the needles passing along So you've got a carriage and that the carriage pulls the needles out to collect the knitting and then it pushes the back in again And then they come out pop out again. That's actually what does the knitting so because it manipulates multiple needles at once It can actually do it really fast So I think that's kind of the main difference between traditional knitting needles and a machine which uses one needle per knit And these machines are typically about 200 needles wide So you can do about like 200 needles with me or 200 nits wide Right, so this is actually really hard work So this video is the lovely Lorna what who's demonstrating a particular technique called Intagia knitting and she's using her knitting machine here So I wanted to show you this because I want to emphasize how much work Using these new machines are it's a bit like a sewing machine in the sense that you sit there And you have to engage with the knitting machine in order to produce knitting So it is considered a handcraft Even though you're using machine to simplify some parts of the tasks other things can be greatly Complicated by having over 200 needles if you're using a ribby, then there's actually 400 needles Yeah, so it is a handcraft and I had a crazy idea about automating this Which is a little bit little bit nutty I'm not gonna spend too much time on this slide But basically I want to emphasize that the these neat old knitting machines They they originally started being built in the night in 1955 or the brother range specifically the brother brand And they stopped making them the night in 1996 I think that was the brother 9 970 that was the last machine they've reduced basically the industry changed and People just weren't buying knitting machines as much anymore It was just so much cheaper and easy to just go out and buy your knits without having to make them at home Yeah, the industry changed so it They aren't being produced anymore So there's a there's a huge variety in terms of hacked knitting There's a huge variety of different machines all the way from purely mechanical to Electron knitting which actually has an on-board computer But yeah, so there's a bit of a lull in the actual history of knitting machines and then in 2007 There's this incredible server hack, which I'm gonna show you in a moment By a pair of Berlin student Berlin art students And then from there we actually see a whole bunch of other hacks coming in on these old knitting machines Specifically the electro range we have an Adafruit hack a yab shield, which is incredible basically replaces the on-board computer And then the knitter rate has anyone here seen heard of the knitter rate on Kickstarter Yeah, we've got a couple of people. How amazing is that machine? It's so so knitter rate is is a whole new domestic knitting machine, which was produced By a team who tried to start an open-source knitting machine project But because the hardware is so specific and these two or is so intricate that it needs to be mass it needs to be produced in a Factory they couldn't actually make it open source Completely so yeah knitter rate amazing machine really really cool right, so this is the the gel somnia by a pair of Berlin art students Make Delena and Hannah I don't actually know very much about this I can infer from the photo that they've taken an old Mechanical and Pizzio machine which has a punch card system in it, and then they've you can see this the silver Devices a servos which are reaching into an old punch card system and manipulating the punch card as it as it goes Which is fantastic. This is the only hack that I've seen out on the internet Anyway, that actually hacks a purely mechanical knitting machine I have a purely mechanical knitting machine at home haven't managed to hack it yet So I would absolutely love to find out more about this if anyone else can speak German and help me search for it But the actual hack that I use today is based on the Adafruit hack Which is the the core part of the hack was actually written by Steve Conklin with help of Lee more Frieda and and Becky Stern, so Steve actually wrote a Python floppy drive emulator and This Python floppy drive emulator if you use a hacked FTDI cable can plug directly into the old floppy drive port on the brother 930 knitting machine so the original floppy drive port the intention was you You draw out your knitting pattern onto a mylar sheet I'd basically a piece of paper you scan it into the onboard scan on the knitting machine and then you can Save so you can back up your patterns onto floppy drive and recover them again But I mean why why use the onboard scan and we can just talk directly to to this floppy old floppy drive port And upload patterns that were never originally, you know part of the scanning process Which is absolutely brilliant. That's something that Steve Conklin built that part of this hack, which is absolutely incredible Right so with with Python we can now Create a an image and it can be converted into a new pattern and then upload directly onto this very old knitting machine the 930 And that's the that's the URL for it I don't have the stage so we're talking roughly 2013 now and this is when I'm like this is so amazing This is incredible. I need to get into this and I found by complete coincidence on the London London hackspace wiki they had documented that they have a a brother 915 knitting machine and Anyway, just you know the documentation like it's in this location. You know you can find it here These are the maintainers I'm like you guys are awesome. I jumped onto the IC channel. I'm like, do you mind if I come along and like Hack your knitting machine like Sure, why not come on in and I'm like, oh you guys are so cool So mad shout out to the London Hackspace who actually got me into all of this in the first place really amazing group of people So this is this is me taking the Adafruit hack and using it on their brother 915 in a machine You'd think so the original Adafruit hack from the US it was on a 930 in a machine and then the The one that we had at London Hackspace was the brother 915 in a machine. They think 939 50 They must be quite similar surely the hack would just you know work seamlessly and not really The 930 in a machine is a 16-bit knitting machine and the 950 is a 32-bit quite different It took me a little while to figure out how to modify the hack to get it working on 32 bit But I did in the end and this is one of the very first things that I knitted from my computer So you can see the graphic there on my computer and the computer is Connected using ft of hacked ftgi cable, which I believe Charles Yain old actually hacked that ftgi cable for me So shout out to Charles isn't the audience today Yeah, so that was my first actual Print if you will Right, so this is my modification of the original hack that works for the nine nine fifty or specifically nine fifty I bet I'm nine fifty nine fifty I similar enough Right, so first point at point can accept an image from my computer Check. Yeah, I think I think I managed to do that. So that's that's good Right over the network Anyone here heard of octoprint? Octoprint for 3d printing. Yeah, we've got a few hands going up about ten I want to say roughly so octoprint is um is a web interface that effect is effectively designed to be a Interface to send your your files through to a 3d printer and I quite like the the implementation of it how you can modify some tweak it I'm pretty sure there's a preview feature as well You can do all these really cool things before you actually send it through to a 3d a 3d printer So I'm I created octonit So octonit is a web Interface that is sitting on a raspberry pi and the raspberry pi is the thing that is connected to the floppy drive port on my nini machine at home So now I don't I don't even have my computer connected to it anymore. I can be a completely different room I can set up an image. I can send it to octo octonit and it can Pre I can preview the the graphic in the actual knitting grid Before I I get the nini machine to stop to stop printing it So octonit it's the web interface for it and this is where octonit lives today So that's the rise reply connected to my nini machine And that's my source code for it. So it's now working over the network. Which is nice Right, so not just black and white and this is where things get quite interesting So When I was at learn a hackspace, I was running some tutorials for people to teach them how to actually work with these old knitting machines And I created some samples. So I was particularly interested in multicolor knitting or These samples in particular to color knitting. So I was learning I was actually learning about knitting and learning how to knit And at the same time trying to hack this knitting machine, which is blew my mind in a few places So here's some some samples that I made for the learn hackspace. I don't know if I still have them anymore They're kicking around a few years ago So these are four examples of ferrule and targia double-jackard latched ferrule. So they're just different techniques of knitting to color The mate in the front they look very very similar and this is the thing I want to point out that they look similar from the front but in the back. It's a wildly different story Fair on particular It works quite well for to color but when it comes to three color it on a knitting machine Anyway, there's a lot of hand manipulation and it gets quite complicated Same for a latched ferrule and in targia is probably the most complicated of the lot in terms of trying to get it to work on The machine so there's a lot of hand manipulation now. I'm trying to automate this process to simplify it. Excuse me So the particular technique that I was quite fond of is double-jackard and Double-jackard is double-layed knitting So you've got knits in the front and it's in the back and the pearls are in the middle for anyone familiar with the knitting terminology there So two layers. So you actually have one picture on the front and a completely different picture on the back It was really awesome. So we don't have to handle float like yarn. That's not being knit into the front In another technique like ferrule it'll be floated in the back, which is just a strand of yarn Which is okay if you have really short strands, but when your strands are Quite get quite long and they can get tangled they can start pulling on the knitting and the knitting can actually start falling apart Which isn't good. So I was quite fond of double-jackard and Not just for the reason that it's nice and neat and clean, but also because it really simplifies the process So this is me doing double-jackard So at this point we've got the network part and this is the actual knitting by knitting by hand So you can see there's two parts of this process There's the the left and right motion and then there's the button pressing left and right and button pressing and Compared to the video they showed you earlier of of learn of what knitting the intagia This is a lot closer to being possible to automate, which is what really excited me about this So double-jackard loved it Now the other cool thing was the knitting machine was always always possible to do multicolor knitting to do more than just two colors the patterns themselves actually supported it and in this card that you can see just On the right right hand side you can see numbers and there's numbers change you got one one one two and then one three Then one three four so you could always support multiple colors But what I really know in particular what I noticed about the original Adafruit hack was it didn't support multiple colors so when Steve Conclune and and Lee more Frida when they were looking into this They never completely reverse engineer the file format for these old knitting machine patterns So they never quite worked everything out So just with a process of Hacking it and trying and see what what you know changing things and see what seeing what happened Reverse engineering I worked out a few things like how to change the width and the height So the original Mylar sheets were 60 Essentially 60 pixels wide and 150 pixels tall, but the knitting machine can support a variable width and height So that was one really cool thing that really helped me And that that actually turned out to be a really important step to find out the next thing which is This Mimo field which always happens which was always blank in the original hack And this I'm pretty sure this comment here if I can read it out to I'm pretty sure the comment was written by I'm by Steve saying the Mimo seems to always be blank I have no idea really and I noticed that it was always the same Length as the number of rows in the knitting. So there's always the same size as the number of rows in the knitting and and that's where I'm like The color integer that's where we store the color integer It's how the knitting machine know is what color it's supposed to be for that particular row So I was super excited about that. That was that was a major epiphany moment for me. That was big turning point I think it's a circa 2014 this stage Right, so that's where I could work out that given an image and given Knowing what color we're doing in each particular row. I modified the hack again to support this color integer and Yeah, and I managed to knit out the More than two colors successfully Something else that I should probably point out is that the actual knitting itself Well, the limitation of only having one color changer on one side means that you have the you have the color on the carriage You go all the way from the color changer to the other side So you've started knitting on that row and then you have to return to the color changer before you can actually switch colors again So it actually has to knit up and then knit back Which means that in all of the patterns that were originally designed for the the brother 950i and any previous knitting machines It always had double height and I can show that to you in that previous example here It always doubles so you got 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 1 1 through 3 It's always doubling because always has to return to the color changer And in order to get that to look like a pixel to look like the images that I had on my computer I also had to double the width as well So I've been really really quite frustrating. I want to one nit per pixel. That's what I wanted That's just that was the thing. I really was quite passionate about so at this stage, I think what Let's be 2016 at this point. So I'd Returned home from London. I only had a two-year working visa here. I'm an Aussie by the way Returned home from London got married had a kid and and this is what this is the thing that was just sitting in the back My mind going we need to fix this we need to solve what we need to we need to make it happen So one thing about having a newborn is of course that you spend a lot of time awake your hands are full You are physically exhausted, but your mind doesn't really get exercise much at all So I found that I spent an awful lot of time thinking about this problem I was I had my hands before I couldn't actually do any typing or do any like in testing or anything but I thought about it and This is what I came up with Four different potential solutions to this particular problem and the computer scientist and me thought well Let's just do them all. Let's just program all of them and see what happens and This is the output We have here is Four nits per pixel. So that's that one Just to skip through a little bit what I call the offset method one it per pixel and The elongation problem is somewhat Reduced which I'll explain that every time you do a pass of the knitting carriage You have to knit into the back because it's it's bird's eye And I won't go into that too much But the more you need into the back and don't need into the front the longer the piece gets to try and Counteract the number of rows in the back that aren't in the front Which is actually pulling on the whole piece and so it resolves this by actually just elongating the problem or elongating the piece and This offset method I was most I was most happy with So one it per pixel this is something that no one else had previously done in the space before Using more than two colors. I did actually Go on to some knitting machine Forums and sort of a big big blog post on this on how it works and how you can do it out Like you can actually test the theory on a on a knitting pattern sheet and scan it into the knitting machine If you don't already have an already hacked a knitting machine, you can still test this idea Most people are quite confused by it. I Am I did get feedback from one crowd who? release commercial software for these knitting machines And they and and yeah, the main feedback from them. I got was it's interesting Doesn't work though, it's not possible It's right here. I've done it Physical it's I've done it anyway There's a there's the back because I'm a knitting machine Enthusiast I wish I the back of my work. So that's the back Done in double jack card with bird's eye backing and just a small Comment on for color There's gizmo and for color I don't do too much for color because with that many that many rows in the back that aren't in the front of that it's actually starting to Bulk up the knitting of a bit. It looks okay when you look at it in a picture But if even you want to come come up here after my talk and want to feel some of this fabric Yeah, for color just doesn't quite feel right as a fabric although it looks all right. So I Have tried for color Excuse me, so there's my code I've updated my code again So feel free if you're at all curious about hacked in any machine worlds. You can you can download that and have a play with it I believe that a a hab hack which is the completely replacing the onboard computer with a with a What I believe is an Arduino based machine. I believe that they've actually started incorporating this new Three color knitting pattern theory. So I believe you can actually produce My algorithm on there on their machine now, which is awesome Right. So more than two cars in any single row after all that. Do you reckon I've done it? Yeah, all right, sweet. That's really okay. Moving on hands free mostly Right, so I didn't actually reinvent the wheel this time. I just went out on board a brother motor K100 They're expensive. So you have to be a really committed to jump into one of these I did actually want to make my own motor arm that would you know reach down and do the actual side part for side swiping for me But you know, I've got a toddler so it's my excuse But the automatic color changer So I did mention earlier that we have two particular actions that were between me and getting an automatic knitting machine so one was that side swiping which is replaced by a Brother motor arm and the other one I actually went to I have to admit I went to my husband to who's really quite amazing in the world of hardware hacking I went to my husband asked him. Hey, can you automate this button pressing for me? And I need to take one look at the problem is like not can't be done Couple of days later, he can but he came back to me. He's like, oh, actually I can I've already done it Um, so this is his is a github repo. He's actually got so he's got not just the code for this Hardware device that he's created He's also got some instructions on how to build one Which is awesome So I've been getting a lot of requests saying hey when you're gonna sell them when you can sell them when you're gonna sell them I'm like Eventually, but you can just actually build your own Yeah, so big shout out to major really really cool on piece of tech So putting it all together. There's a time lapse video. So this is what this is where I say it's mostly automated So I still need to cast on For any hand it is out there that appreciate the casting of processes quite frustrating no matter We like what part of the knitting world you come from Yeah, the nice thing is I can actually walk away from the knitting Which is pretty much my goal that's really what I wanted to achieve which is good fun I do still have to come back roughly every hundred rows or so because the knitting is coming down underneath the knitting machine And it's being held down by weights. Sorry after about a hundred rows the weights are getting close to the floor and I need to Come back and move I'll try and automate that one too for you Right so so that so this particular knit actually was completely flawless it worked beautifully Other than that came back and move the move the weights It worked beautifully except the the device I was using to take the the time lapse it ran out of battery So you just have to trust me that it worked There we go cut out there And also the the casting off process looks very similar to the casting on so I just have to for each needle It's holding a knit. I just need to to close it off and finish it up So this is the piece of that that I was knitting that particular day It's a um tessellator rocket scarf MC Escher style. Good fun, right? Can hit nann hands-free mostly? What do you reckon did we get there? Sweet Okay, so I've got three minutes now to talk about the universe. So I'm gonna speed up my talking even quicker Oh, these are other things that I've done previously. So I've done more than just the universe So feel free to come talk to me about them afterwards All right, so My goodness I tweeted this on Sunday and it got since since last Sunday so a week now actually nothing about it It got four fourteen thousand retweets and seventy two to seventy two thousand likes on Twitter Wow That was overwhelming Yeah, amazing uproaring of love from the internet community, which is absolutely incredible I've never done anything that anyone's liked that much before so so so amazing So this piece was actually part sponsored by emf camp it wouldn't exist without emf camp I really want to emphasize that So the blue yarn and the white yarn was paid for by emf camp But I like I was a little bit too ambitious and I made it too big so that emf camp couldn't actually afford the gray yarn and you know That's fun So what you're seeing here is a picture of the The visible universe that we can see with the naked human eye So it's all 88 constellations across the top We've got the constellations in the northern hemisphere across the bottom of the constellations in the southern hemisphere There's the equatorial line that's through the center Which is basically the equator of the of the earth and projected out into space so you can get a sense of where What yeah, what part of northern and southern hemisphere you can see The gray cloud is actually representation of the Milky Way and We've also got the Sun the moon in the planets in this particular piece The stars have been scaled according to their luminosity or magnification actually So humans can see up to magnification five or six with a naked eye Comfortably, so that's that's how you can see that this piece Shows up to make the magnification five So it's really the the visible universe according to the naked human eye The planets I actually designed the planets to line up to a particular date and time and they lined up At 6 p.m. Friday the 31st the day that emf opened where to hit a deadline Oh So there's 88 official constellations Out there. There's actually 89 Which have been labeled in this piece and that's because serpents Constellation the one and only constellation out of the mall that is actually Split into two non contiguous parts so serpents Serpents quarter and serpents kaput have actually been labeled separately because it's non contiguous So that's why there's actually 89 constellations on this map. I just want to emphasize that It's been nitted using Luke Luke police sauce Australian wolf close to close to home So it's essentially 100% Australian made and because of that I I gave one constellation In this star map its modern name and that's the southern cross which can be seen on the Australian flag Yeah, I should emphasize again I couldn't have done this without the help from help and support from my husband I've been working on this for a couple of months now, and it's been pretty much every single weekend for several months Trying to get this piece finished for emf camp. So a big shout out to John Spencer. He's been absolutely amazing Yeah, and surprise it also lights up so I took this by the way Actually one one minute overdue now, so I'm trying to talk really quickly I took I took the star map to a hackathon in my workplace R. E. A. I. O Where I work is real estate.com. Do you and I got a team an amazing incredible team of 18 people and we say like a Designers front-end developers back-end developers system architects and and we got together over three days We built a website that talks to an AWS lander service that talks to an AWS IOT service that lights up Neo pixels in the knitting Which is controlled by an ESP 32 So incredible, but only eight of the constellations light up So eventually I would love to have to finish it and light them all up, but yeah you so you can actually see this piece In this tent Look for this tent. It is the lounge and you'll find it in there if you want to have it That's it