The brother KH930 has 555 built in patterns, but we also wanted to be able to make custom patterns. After some research we found the AYAB (All yarns are beuatiful) collective.

AYAB

This collective sells a device that connects the knitting machine to your computer by using an Arduino Uno and plugging it into the device. This way you can upload custom pixel graphics to the machine that get turned into patterns via their software. With this, the possibilities are endless.

You can either buy the finished device ready to plug it in or you can buy a building kit that you solder yourself. We decided to buy the buidling kit and solder it ourself. This was a challenge because we had never soldered before but with some help we got it done.

Connecting it to the machine

This part proved to be a challenge as well because whenever we plugged it in, there was this very loud electronic buzzing noise.

We aren't sure why this happens. We got some help from the AYAB discord server and tried different things like isolating the Arduino with cardboard but we weren't able to fix the problem in time for the deadline.

Needles not moving correctly

The other problem was that the needles weren't moving into the correct position for the uploaded pattern. They moved either randomly and sometimes not at all.

This might be because we were not using an original Arduino Uno but a clone. We tried two different clones because we didn't have an original available in time and installed a chinese driver on it to emulate the original Arduino but unfortunately nothing worked.