The key to design is to fail fast and often - so that you can iterate and improve fast and often. It takes only about ten minutes to generate a pattern with the code, export it to SVG, cut out the pattern in a punch card with the Cameo, and then knit up a swatch with the knitting machine.
Openscad youtube code#
More precisely, the point is that we can now generate TONS of patterns very quickly using this OpenSCAD code and the craft cutter. This isn’t the best pattern (and it would certainly look better with a more contrasting pair of yarn colors), but that’s kind of the point. Here’s the resulting knit swatch for this “mixed-up baby square diagonals” pattern:
Openscad youtube free#
Feel free to use the code in the Appendix below to make your own cards! However the beauty of doing all this with code is that once that is done, you never have to do it again! Even better, it would not be difficult to modify the code to make the punch cards fit different knitting machines.
Openscad youtube trial#
It took a lot of trial and error to get the size of the card, the size of the holes, the distance between the holes, and other features just right so that the cut punch card would work in the knitting machine. Here’s how this pattern comes out as a punched card, ready to put into the knitting machine:
To print a punch card with this pattern, we export from OpenSCAD in SVG format, load it into Silhouette Studio, select all lines and set them to red (our “cut” color), and then send the job to the cutter with settings for our Dura-Lar paper:
The example from the top of this article used a combination of diagonals and off-diagonals to make a complex baby-squares-mixed-into-diagonals pattern: // baby square diagonal mixup
Openscad youtube software#
All of these patterns can be output as SVG files from OpenSCAD and then sent directly to the Silhouette Studio software for the Cameo craft cutter. To see how this code works, see the Appendix at the bottom of this post. We can shift the pattern left or right, as shown in the second screenshot above, using “shift”: punch(squares(4,5,rows),shift=1) Īnd prepending a “gauge” modifier changes the aspect ratio to show what the knitted piece itself would look like in this pattern (note that physically knit stitches are typically wider than they are tall), as shown in the third screenshot: gauge()punch(squares(4,5,rows),shift=1) įinally, we can “reverse” the pattern so that holes and non-holes trade places, as shown in the fourth screenshot: gauge()punch(squares(4,5,rows),shift=1,reverse="yes") To use this pattern we put it into a “punch” module that actually creates the visual design, as shown in the code and leftmost screenshot below: punch(squares(4,5,rows)) The nested loops place zeroes (for holes) at any coordinate location where either the horizontal or vertical position divides the selected square size. This code lets the user define a width and height for each square, and then set how long the overall pattern should continue. For example, here is the code for punching open squares: function squares(across,high,length) = // across div by 24 The basic idea is to define basic shapes and repeat and modify them to make patterns. You can see the complete code in the Appendix at the bottom of this post. Here’s what it looks like in action, with the code on the left and the output on the right, including punches for the machine belts to make the card fit a standard Brother KH-881 knitting machine: With OpenSCAD we can create patterning shortcuts that allow us to quickly combine and modify basic elements like diagonals, squares, and dots to make complex designs. Today we’ll speed up the pattern-creation process significantly by bringing OpenSCAD code to the party. Things got better when we moved to Designing Knitting Machine Punch Cards with StitchFiddle, where we created patterns by hand using an online drawing program and then cut those punch patterns using an electronic craft cutter. We started out our Knitting Machine Punch Card Trials with the usual analog method of punching holes into cards ourselves with a hand-held puncher, making up the pattern as we went along. As we’ve seen in our previous posts on machine knitting, punching holes into cards can be tedious if any part of the process is manual.
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