I made a thing: hacked knitting to the extreme

[Sarah Simmonds]

So I thought I might share this here as I'm super excited (squee!!) and London Hackspace is what started it all.

Cue Brother 950i Knitting machine. A most excellent device with oh so many secrets. The one thing I've dearly wanted to do, the ultimate hack on this machine that no one else seems to have quite cracked yet, is double layer knitting using more than two colours.

Cue crazy knitting lady ;) and 3yrs of commitment. A little insight here (ooh, file header data... but it's gibberish), a few experiments there (ooh, custom width and length settings!) and one major eureka moment (OMG THAT'S HOW IT STORES THE COLOUR BIT DATA!). 

All this reverse engineering has finally paid off today, my friends. I've finally finished my first multicolour double layered knit and I'm THRILLED! Can you feel the thrill?! :D

I couldn't just do any old design for this inaugural First Multicolour event. After all these years, it had to appropriately reflect the special bond I've developed with this remarkable machine, the Brother 950i.

So, without further delay, I present to you the ILOVEYOU scarf. Converted from the ILOVEYOU virus source code (circa early 21st century) into binary and mapped to four colours. It took 8hrs to knit.

ILOVEYOU Brother 950i <3

[Adrian Godwin]

Congrats, Sarah ! Very satisfying to have proper control of a machine!

-adrian

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[David Murphy]

Most subtly geeky scarf ever :-D

[Tim Yates]

It looks amazing Sarah - congratulations!

[Lynz]

That's amazing! So happy all your hard work has paid off :D 

So when's the Etsy shop opening? :P

[Stephen Lavelle]

That looks good!  What's next for your knitting adventures?

[chrisbob12]

Classy hack, and the scarf looks fab!

[Lewis Kay-Thatcher]

Congrats Sarah! I don't understand most of that but I love it. Looks great too!!

[Monty]

So awesome!

On Saturday, 23 January 2016 11:14:18 UTC, Sarah Simmonds wrote:

[Sarah Simmonds]

Thanks for the support, all! I have no idea what's next. Possibly more binary conversions; the first few hundred lines of VI looks cool. I've also done some recursively grown tree scarves and cellular automata. There's no end to the possibilities!

So many people come through the LHS and make a tonne of awesome stuff. I'd love to see more 'I Made a Thing' posts :D Would anyone else like to kindly honor us with their awesome thing?

[Nick Johnson]

I would love a cellular automata scarf. Or to be taught to use the knitting machine to make my own. :)

On Sun, Jan 24, 2016 at 4:43 PM Sarah Simmonds <sa...@chixor.net> wrote:

Thanks for the support, all! I have no idea what's next. Possibly more binary conversions; the first few hundred lines of VI looks cool. I've also done some recursively grown tree scarves and cellular automata. There's no end to the possibilities!

So many people come through the LHS and make a tonne of awesome stuff. I'd love to see more 'I Made a Thing' posts :D Would anyone else like to kindly honor us with their awesome thing?

--

[Colin Rowat]

Wow - that's thoroughly cool, Sarah, and may even have made my day yesterday.

Thank you also for helping steer the list back towards the higher ground.

Colin

On Saturday, January 23, 2016 at 11:14:18 AM UTC, Sarah Simmonds wrote:

[Jon Russell]

It's brilliant !

How does the binary map to the 4 colours?

Jon.

[Dirk-Willem van Gulik]

On 23 Jan 2016, at 12:14, Sarah Simmonds <sa...@chixor.net> wrote:
>
> So I thought I might share this here as I'm super excited (squee!!) and London Hackspace is what started it all.
>
> Cue Brother 950i Knitting machine. A most excellent device with oh so many secrets. The one thing I've dearly wanted to do, the ultimate hack on this machine that no one else seems to have quite cracked yet, is double layer knitting using more than two colours.

...

> So, without further delay, I present to you the ILOVEYOU scarf. Converted from the ILOVEYOU virus source code (circa early 21st century) into binary and mapped to four colours. It took 8hrs to knit.

Most lovely! Though would a common-cold or influenza virus not be a bit closer to the world of warm wolly scarfs ?

Dw.

[Simon Howes]

If you're using human virusses, its gonna be a pretty long scarf!

(Btw: how many times was the original virus repeated on the scarf? Old virusses tended to be quite small, hand coded, asm)

[Sarah Simmonds]

Jon:

I didn't use the most complicated formula for this one:

00 black

01 red

10 silver

11 grey

Dirkx: 

Ooh, I hadn't thought of codifying organic matter.

AbbyKatt:

Actually this scarf is only the first half of the ILOVEYOU source code. I ran out of colours to make the second scarf.

[Nigel Worsley]

On 24 January 2016 at 11:24, 'Simon Howes' via London Hackspace

<london-h...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
> If you're using human virusses, its gonna be a pretty long scarf!

Not as long as you might think, the flu virus is about 15,000
nucleotides. Not a great deal bigger than that scarf (equivalent to
less than 4K Bytes) - one of the advantages of using a more mature API
:)

Nigle

[Kursor]

Congratulations. 

Wondering if we could meet up some time at the space, as I am wanting to do a similar project.

K

On Saturday, 23 January 2016 11:14:18 UTC, Sarah Simmonds wrote: