strangeloop 2015 - sweaters as a service

In the 1980's, Nintendo had plans for making a knitting add-on to the NES, with an interface that resembled Mariopaint, but with patterned mittens, sweaters, and scarves as output. Sadly, this product never saw the light of day. Devastated upon hearing this and dreaming about what could have been, a group of Airbnb engineers (who knew nothing about machine knitting) set out to hack a knitting machine from the 1980's to be computer-controlled, using a tutorial from adafruit as a starting point.

Hear about our struggles and triumphs, which ranged from learning to replace knitting machine needles and conduct basic repairs, to emulating a floppy drive and hacking together a custom cable cable to send our own patterns to the machine, to writing our own yarn printer API in ruby/rails and printing our first doge meme in yarn. And watch us as we send images and knit requests to our yarn server, and behold as it knits ugly sweaters from those images!

Transcript

9. photo by tanya breshears
10. I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I’M DOING I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I’M DOING
15. photo by tanya breshears
30. code time