8. Open Source Hardware - From Fibers to Fabric¶

This week I worked on hacking a Brother Electroknit KH-940 using AYAB software and Evil Mad Scientist board. I wanted to knit some of AI interated images that I had created in my course work at Columbia University (Digital Storytelling III: Immersive Pro under the direction of Lance Weiler). To make these images I used Playform to create images/speculate some future design based on of my previous fashion design and inspiration images for a character I was creating for another storytelling project.

Some of my iternations from Playform

Example of previous interation for character design created in 2019. 1 of over 50,000 iterations trained with my previous fashion designs.

I enjoy working with AI and especially Playform because it has the uncanny way of reading my mind, creating iterations based on some of the design ideas I am already thinking about. I feel like I am creating in collaboration with the AI and am intersted in further evolving this ideas by knitting some of these images.

Research¶

I'm also very inspired by a project from Japan called Glitch Knit. This collective hacked a Brother KH-970 and created their own software to knit "glitchy" patterns. They have their own line of beautiful sweaters but unfortunlty they don't have the open source code or instructions for hacking online anymore.

Resources and Tools

Brother Electro Knit KH-940 and knitting accessories
Evil Mad Scientist Board
Ayab Software
Knit King KR-900 Ribber
Fine Woolike yarn

Useful links¶

Process¶

I have previous expereince working on standard single and double bed Brother Knitting Machines as well as Shima Seiki Machines.It's been a while since I've used my Brother Machine, but I have basic machine knitting skills and didn't have to worry about the learning curve for that aspect of the project.

One of my previous samples of 2-color Jacquard Knit done on the Shima. I was hoping I would be able to do some of my samples in this method. I made what I call Emotion Drawings in the Shima Software, just depicting what I felt in the moment.

It's a good thing that I was inspired by Glitch Knits because I really ran into so many glitches and problems while hacking this machine and trying to knit my ideas. I really made so many mistakes and had to restart so many times, I'm just going to document what worked otherwise there is 9 pages of failiures and maybe half a page of what is working. Some of the steps I copy/pasted from the above links because they worked but I really needed to cobble together several of the resources and have some luck before my machine is finally knitting anything.

Firstly, I selected the Evil Mad Scientist board because of its shape, that can more easily fit in the knitting machine and still close the cover unlike the tradtional AYAB board. Secondly because I was able to buy it in the US off of Etsy so the shipping is faster for me than the AYAB board, which comes from Germany. But what I didn't realize is there is not as much online support for the board and the seller I purchased from is not really answering any questions I have. So I ended up using some of the steps for the traditional AYAB board in my installation, but still it's not perfect. The greatest difficulty with the EMS board is that the firmware needs to be updated, but when I attempted to do that my machine would freeze. We got it to work with some luck, but I am uncertain if the firmware updated or if it's just glitchy in the software.

Evil Mad Genius (AYAB)Board

I also purchased my knitting machine the Electroknit KH-940 online, mostly they are sold on Ebay, but there are other resources as well. This also ended up being a problem as most of the documentation available online is for the KH-910, while there are similarities they are not exactly the same, so I'm not sure if some of my problems are coming from the model of machine I chose to use. There were also some damaged needles that I didn't realize I needed to change until I was deep into some of my bigger projects, so this caused some addtional drop stiches.

Brother Electroknit KH-940 (This isn't my machine but a similar model that is for sale online).

0) Unplug the machine and disconnect the cord. The orginal power source was not needed for this hack as the EMS board has it's own power source.

1)Unscrew the top of the machine near the computurized part and unplug the connections as shown.

more to come...

First I knitted the triangle sample file that came with the AYAB software, there were many problems, but once I figured it out I moved on to a sample of my own design.

It was very hard to get the knit to work with 3 colors so I eventually just reverted back to the 2 color Fair Isle.

Gallery¶

Triangle sample pattern included with Ayab software.

After I finised the intial triangle pattern test, I tried one of my emotion drawings next. I can see a glitch in my machine or the software, I'm not sure. but there is a black line down the side that isn't in the orginal design.

Emotion drawing created in Photoshop and imported into AYAB software hanging on the knitting machine bed.

The Emotion drawings were too abstract to tell is something is wrong with the machine, so I thought I would try to make something more recongzinable, so I tried Bitmap self-portraits using Ca-mera App on iPhone 6s Plus.

There are a lot of glitches in this file that were not in the AYAB software. You can see it if you compare the different knits, they are all the same file but printed slightly differently. I made this a failry narrow sample. I probably would have gotten better detail if I hung more needles but I wanted to see what was possible with just a few.

I also tried 3 color jacquard but had a lot of trouble with it getting stuck on the gatepegs, so I stuck to simpler 2 color designs until I can get a color changer and figure out what is wrong with the machine. As you can see from the back of it in comparaison to the Shima, there are a lot more glitches in what should be a fairly even pattern.