GoKawiilThis is the third in a series of blog posts about the Material Programming Project. We are developing malleable knitting software for the Kniterate, a semi-industrial knitting machine. The first post, on the Knitout project, is available here, and a longer post about the Kniterate machine is here. The next post includes more detail about Kcode.
B, Rosie and I met this week to work on knitout generation for the Kniterate, and plan the first programming-based session for the material programming workshop series. We started by trying to articulate exactly what it is we’re trying to achieve (both with the workshops, and with the project more generally) in concrete, technical terms:
A 2.5D milling workflow for the Roland MDX20 in mods. The same workflow could easily be adapted for another mill, a laser cutter, vinyl cutter or embroidery machine.
open knitting file formats are in a ~larval stage and aren’t widely used outside of academia
in general, interesting (open-source, malleable) CAD software benefits hugely from the benefit and adoption of machine-agnostic and interchangeable file formats
the adoption of new kinds of file format requires usable and accessible tooling: it’s not enough for them to just exist
if we can make something our students can use, chances are other people will be able to use it too
A big part of this work is to get the existing tools into a form our students can use, while also properly articulating the backend structure both for ourselves and for anyone else who wants to tinker with things under the hood. Examples of places this has been done well in the wider world include the mods project, a modular tool for rapid prototyping used for the control and automation of a wide variety of CAD machines, open-source 3D printing software, and open-source embroidery projects like PEMbroider and p5.embroider.
open knitting file formats
The same file in knitout (left) and kcode (right) format
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