[Travis Goodspeed] and Hackaday alum [Fabienne Serriere] joined forces to develop an alternative interface for a knitting machine. They’re working with the Brother KH-930E machine. We saw [Becky Stern] use the same model by manipulating data on an emulated floppy drive for the device. [Travis] and [Fabienne] went a different route, and are emulating the keypad using an Arduino and a set of transistors.
They started by reverse engineering the keypad matrix using a continuity tester. Once they worked out the column and row layout they connected each to an NPN transistor. The Arduino sketch simulates button presses to set knitting bits for each row, with just one reset button for user input. This can be used to send data from a PC, or as a standalone system. Either way, it’s not only a great way to add functionality to the kitting machine, but a good example of how to interface with the keypad on just about any device.
This is what I thought about doing to a sewing machine before cheaper USB ones came out
It’s just the KH-930, doesn’t need the E at the end to be a hackable one, and from the research I did the other compatible models with the mods we did are KH940, KH950i, KH965i & KH970.
wow.. this is a very good project, i dont know speak english, but i know when some project is good, and this poject is one o them
regards from mexico.
excuse me for my bad english, but my female teacher of english is stupid.