Hacked Star Map - Computerphile

Key Takeaways

right so this is uh a knitted star map of the night sky it's a it's a little bit big so it's um 2.8 meters tall by 4.4 meters wide um so it's not a small thing to carry in your luggage on a plane halfway around the world so it's 15 kilos as well um yeah there's a bit tricky getting on the plane so we set up an uh esp32 chip which is listening to a aws iot trigger it's got an onboard wi-fi that blue light is actually telling me that it hasn't quite connected to aws yet so it's just working its way through when the blue light turns off mean it's fine let me tell you about knitting i i took a a domestic knitting machine from the 1980s we're talking really old-school tech here um with a 32-bit um on-board computer and uh and i hacked it to turn it into a modern-day network printer so there was a few hacks involved with that one so first of all i used a raspberry pi to interface between the onboard computer and my computer so the raspberry pi is obviously sitting on the network and it's running a website which i can connect to with my laptop in a completely different room and then i can send it an image and it can process that image give me a preview of what it'll look like in the knitted fabric and then i can press print and there's there's still a little bit of work involved in actually getting the print started physically with the knitting machine you have to cast on it's there's a bit of a process there but once it's running um i've got a robot arm that's running it backwards and forwards to actually perform the knitting and i also built with with the help of from my husband john spencer i built a um an automatic color changer so i can do multiple color knittings not just black and white like multi-color knitting um on this on this old school knitting machine normally they're designed um kind of like a sewing machine in the sense that you sit there and you actively engage with the machine and you are constantly manipulating it in order to produce the end result which is the knitting um so in the efforts of automating it i took out an entire an entire process of creating knitting patterns so i don't actually create anything i create an image and then the process will create the pattern for me um and then uh yeah and i've automated the actual color changing part which which means that i don't need to sit with a knitting machine at all once it's running one of my major contributions to the knitting to the machine knitting community was a whole new algorithm that i created to create one knit per pixel knitting in three colours so that's something that these machines were never previously capable of doing so i created a whole new algorithm in order to do that um and i think the main reason why no one had done before is because it takes a lot of processing to sort of think through the problem and get it working so i was able to create a few different algorithms and then i you know been the computer scientist i tested lots of different algorithms and i came up with one that that had sort of the best results um which is the one you see behind me oh there you go there's pisces going off before this piece was actually finished i entered it into something called rea io which is a three-day hackathon that my work runs uh for over three days every quarter which is amazing um and i um yeah i did a call out to get helpers to light up the constellations mostly um laptop covers scarves um baby blankets yeah so i've done i've done a few things nothing quite this big though so this was a bit intimidating this particular project i don't know too much about astronomy i'm very much an amateur but i plotted where the planets will line up on the actual knittings they line up to a particular date and time and i've been working this project for a few months now so i was kind of hoping that i would hit the deadline and i did actually hit it this tapestry was installed um by or before 6 6 p.m friday the 31st which is the day that emf opened this knitting was installed ready to go and the planets aligned at that time i'm telling you could you see them or was the cloud cover it was actually still daylight but it did check that night i did take a few hours later and yeah the the moon was spot on the the planets were pretty much in the right spot so yeah that was that was satisfying what happens to this now oh right um a few people have asked me that question um i i really want to keep it in the public domain somewhere um so i i will be taking it home with me uh so nothing's really finalized there yet but um yeah hopefully people can actually come and see it and like you know touch knitting it's it's a it's a fabric it you know people need to touch it so hopefully we'll stay in the public domain somewhere it took a lot longer than i was hoping mostly because i was having a problem with um with the yarn getting caught on the left side right near the color changer so i mean yarn is a fuzzy fuzzy material