Happy to announce a beta version of software that quickly processes images into knitwear! Sector67 members Tanya Cunningham, Joe Kerman, and Davi Post have been working for the last month or two on enhancing a Becky Stern / Adafruit hack of the Brother Electroknit KH-930. Unfortunately for this software to be useful to you, you’ll need to find a vintage Electroknit machine and someone to teach you how to run the thing!
Start with a normal (preferably high contrast) image:
Helps to boost the contrast a bit:
The software dithers it to b&w and outputs pattern data, which is loaded into the knitting machine and then knit with chosen colors:
The knitting machine been used to create a number of cool objects around Sector67, including our own argyle pattern:
My face on a pillow (reason #4,592 to start a hackerspace):
Inverted “skull” looking version:
The SETI “wow” signal:
The KH-930 (made in 1986) has only 2 KB of static RAM, which holds about 13600 stitches (200 x 68). Larger pieces can be knit by slicing the image into segments, this is almost the size of the coffee table (magazine at above right for scale). The team plans to automate this in a later version of img2track.
