Hack, Make, Teach
15 Jul
While we were at NYC Resistor last month, Susan and I spotted a knitting machine. It turned out to be Bre’s Brother Electroknit model KH-930E. We ended up making a deal and shipped it home. Sadly, both ends of the machine took some shipping damage, but it’s still functional.
I’ve been hacking and reverse-engineering a bit since then, and I’ve written a python program which emulates the optional external floppy disk drive for the knitting machine. With access to saved files, I’ve begun cracking apart the file format used by the machine, and extending the information other people had already gathered.
I’m keeping the wiki updated here.
I will release the emulator program very soon. I’ve put in some new functionality and haven’t had a chance to test it with the knitting machine yet. As soon as that’s done, I’ll post it.
UPDATE:
The external floppy emulator is available, link is on the wiki page referenced above.
3 Responses for "Knitting machinations"
Make some photos =)
I am trying to get a Tandy disk drive to work on my Brother knitting machine 965i. The drive works, it hums when I turn it on. I have it connected to the knitting machine via a 8 pin cord. The knitting machine goes through the steps to load a design, but nothing happens and I mean nothing. Any hints on how to trouble shoot this. I have a program called Designaknit and a DAK cord that goes from the knitting machine to my computer running the software. However, I have lots of disks with info on them saved in the brother format which I want to get into my knitting machine so that I can download them into the Designaknit program to convert and save to .pat format.
Lois Murphy
Wausau Wisconsin
I’m sorry, I don’t really have any experience actually using external drives with the knitting machines. When I was working on my software drive emulator, I found that is the knitting machine couldn’t talk to the disk drive, it would beep several times. That’s about all I can contribute.