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@sailorhg
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 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/sinatra and printing our first doge meme in yarn. And watch us (LIVE!) as we send images and knit requests to our yarn server, and behold as it knits ugly sweaters from those images!

Talk given at GORUCO 2015: http://goruco.com

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In the talk titled "Sweaters as a service" by Amy Wibowo at GoRuCo 2015, the speaker discusses her journey of transforming an old knitting machine into a modern, computer-controlled device, inspired by a proposed Nintendo knitting add-on from the 1980s that never made it to production. She details her motivation, the challenges faced, and the accomplishments achieved through the collaboration with a team of engineers from Airbnb. The following key points outline the content of the presentation:

- **Inspiration**: Amy's motivation stemmed from an article on Kotaku about failed Nintendo peripherals, particularly a knitting add-on that ignited her dream of creating a networked yarn printer.
- **Acquisition and Initial Challenges**: She found a broken 1980s knitting machine and, although daunting due to its complexity, she was excited to start the project, needing to first learn how to operate the machine properly.
- **Team Collaboration**: With the help of engineers who knew nothing about knitting, they established a collaborative environment during an Airbnb hackathon to modify and hack the knitting machine.
- **Progression through Struggles**: After stitching simple patterns, the team grappled with complex features, realizing the difficulty of knitting patterns available was reflective of the original target demographic (older users) and not aligned with current interests.
- **Web Interface Development**: To democratize the fun, a web interface was developed to allow anyone in the office to upload their own images to be knitted. This was implemented using Ruby and Sinatra, creating a unique pipeline for image processing and machine control.
- **Lessons Learned**: The project taught them respect for the craft of knitting, the importance of teamwork, and empathy for beginners in programming and hardware hacking. The ultimate success led to the production of custom sweaters, including novelty designs like Doge.

In conclusion, Amy emphasized the invigorating experience of exploring new domains and how integral it is to foster empathy in computer science education, bridging the gap between coding, art, and existing skills. She opened the floor for discussions centered on hardware hacking and related concepts, grateful for the opportunity to share her story.

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