Sweaters as a Service
summary
An Airbnb team hacks an 1980s knitting machine with 200 needles to turn images into knitwear: they emulate a floppy drive, build a USB-to-serial custom cable, and write a ruby/rails yarn printer API and Sinatra web front end that converts photos to 1-bit dithered bitmaps. Results include a doge meme and grumpy cat knitted in about 15 minutes per swatch; machine supports two colors, cost about $500, and required needle repairs and spool MacGyvering.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:32Inspiration
- 3:12Hacking a Knitting Machine
- 7:03Knitting Builtin Patterns
- 9:00Sending Patterns
- 10:52Machine Knitting
- 13:32Code
- 14:40Learnings
- 15:35Ideas
- 17:23Questions
