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

1. View Slide

2. View Slide

3. View Slide

4. View Slide

5. View Slide

6. View Slide

7. View Slide

8. View Slide

9. photo by tanya breshears
   

   View Slide

10. I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I’M DOING
    I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I’M DOING
    

    View Slide

11. View Slide

12. View Slide

13. View Slide

14. View Slide

15. photo by tanya breshears
    

    View Slide

16. View Slide

17. View Slide

18. View Slide

19. View Slide

20. View Slide

21. View Slide

22. View Slide

23. View Slide

24. View Slide

25. View Slide

26. View Slide

27. View Slide

28. View Slide

29. View Slide

30. code time
    

    View Slide

31. View Slide

32. View Slide

33. View Slide

34. View Slide

35. View Slide

36. View Slide

37. View Slide

38. View Slide

39. View Slide

40. View Slide

41. View Slide

42. View Slide

43. View Slide