Automatic Machine Knitting of 3D Meshes | Hacker News Reader

Automatic Machine Knitting of 3D Meshes

textiles-lab.github.io

159 pointsxbryanx36 comments

What about applying this to making breast prostheses, whether they be automatically or manually knitted? It might allow a better fit and match to the existing shape if a pattern could be generated on a per-patient basis?

https://www.knittedknockers.org/

Things your Grandma said while knitting ... never:

> The function is feasible for machine knitting if its Reeb graph has an upward planar embedding.

Speak for your own grandma!

After mine died I discovered she had studied mathematics under Peano for a couple of years before getting married. Unfortunately the only source I have for this interaction with Peano is an inscription on a Dover book that a friend of hers had gifted her.

Happy international women's day!

Nice! My grandma studied mathematics under Eamonn De Valera, the American who liberated Ireland.

I'd love to see if I can do a 3d scan of my torso and have a sweater knit that exactly fits my frame. It'd be very interesting to see clothing made in this fashion.

I don't think this would be ideal for clothes, although I'm sure it would be pretty good. Clothes are designed to move. They have pleats and extra space. A perfectly form fitting sweater would have cause stress/stretching as you moved your arms.

Similar methods are already in use in clothing design. Programs and patterns have the "extra space" built in; the jargon for it in knitwear is "ease" and it varies not only according to desired fit but also type of yarn/fiber. A garment with negative ease, for instance, needs to expand to fit onto your body, while a garment with positive ease is larger than the body measurements, and of course you could vary the ease within the garment.

There is some interesting engineering that needs to happen near large joints -- as you say, a "perfectly form-fitting sweater" might have some difficulties at the armpits for instance as we have such a range of motion there. But these are well-studied problems!

Although, once you gain or lose a few pounds, it wouldn’t fit quite so exactly anymore.

I think knit cloth would do really well with small variations. If the target is form fitting, you want it to just touch everywhere. Knit is pretty tolerant of that.

Didn't know CMU had a Textile Lab! Looks to be under the Robotics Institute, or affiliated. Very interesting, thanks!

This could be very useful for weaving carbon fiber composite parts. Orienting the fibers to make a strong part is quite an art.

Indeed, this kind of reminded me a little of the Westworld robot printers. But having a program individually calculate all the orientations and determine the best strength is a just as much of an art.

This is knitting, not weaving. Big difference.

Cool - I can have a Utah teapot cosy for my teapot.

I love these machines they’re so much fun to watch (for me at least they’re still in “how on earth did someone work out how to make this?” Part of my brain)

I recall someone publishing something similar a few years ago - I wonder how this compares?

Very interesting. Could make a fun hobby out of it. Maybe use it to construct woven carbon fiber objects?

Seems like an interesting idea, you can get it to lay up some pretty complex shapes using the common weaves but it is an art/pia. Seems there has been some research into it https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/how-to-knit-carbon-fiber...

CF isn't so different from a lot of natural fibers, I would think if you loaded up the knitting machine with bamboo yarn, you could glop resin onto the finished product to achieve something similar to carbon.

The mold is the tricky bit. You need to make your knitting in sections that will fit over the mold. It might be more effective than using strips, or it might just be more expensive.

Rather odd that they're only showing the video as a downloadable MP4 file. I didn't see a copyright notice, so I put it up on YouTube.

https://youtu.be/R3Ax7U5dvbc

Note that the video is silent.

There's no such thing as a copyright notice. There's no need for them, copyright exists automatically on any creative work. What you may have been looking for is a copyright license. These give permission to share the work, possibly subject to certain conditions.

The absence of a license simply means you ARE NOT licensed to share the work in any way shape or form.

Your intentions seem to be good but you may want to reconsider.

As we all know, the internet is about the free and open sharing of other people's ideas !

That's a nice sentiment but that isn't how laws work.

Laws are a sentiment but that isn't how reality works.

Indeed. Western legal principle: everything is legal, until you get convicted.

(Technically it's even more specific than that. You don't get to complain or get enforcement just because something is illegal. 3 conditions need to be satisfied. First, it needs to violate the law, as it the law applies to both the complainant and the defendant. Second there needs to be damage to the complainant. Thirdly there needs to be a causal connection between the damage and the law violation. And of course, there's still the implicit condition: there must be a complaint in the first place)

I wish people would keep this in mind when talking about law.

The link for the video I see goes to Google Drive, which has its own built-in Youtube-like streaming player; is that not what you're seeing?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_XlprMZKhhuk89xsZMMo7Qxv801...

I can't get Google Drive to play mp4 files in Chrome (not here or on any other occasion). Is this happening to anyone else? Maybe I'm using a browser extension that messes with Google Drive. What I see is a waiting ticker cycling forever. The only way for me to play an mp4 file on GD is to download it locally, then manually drag and drop it in the browser or on another video player.

Thank you! Couldn't get the link to play on mobile and this helped

Does anyone know of service that lets you send in such a design and get the result posted back like exists for laser cutting or PCBs?

Amazing! Programmers are needed in each discipline. This is such a transdisciplinary project.

Looks really interesting. I presume this is accepted to SIG18 ???

Decisions for SIGGRAPH 2018 haven't been made yet. This may have been submitted directly to the journal Transactions on Graphics.

how much does a knitting machine cost?

They cost about as much as a typical industrial CNC machine tool, so close to $250k installed.

You can also get hobby machines as well, starting from a a couple of thousand dollars.

This is true, but you'll tend to get used machines (even at that price). I own a Passap 6000 as well as a single-bed machine; they're fun toys to have, definitely on the unusual side of the nerdy scale.

Various links to fun projects:

* https://www.hackerspace-bamberg.de/Passap_pfaff_e6000 * https://www.hackerspace-bamberg.de/Knitty

* http://www.kniterate.com (this is very cool, but $8000)

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