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Comment by quohort | Hacker News Reader

makes me wonder if there is some sort of generic CAD for processes that involve bending and folding. For example, knitting fabric, bending wire, bending sheet metal, tying knots.

For example, you could have a parametric design for a custom/designer piece of clothing and adjust parameters to tailor to individual wearers while having some automated manufacturing

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Industrial knitting machines seem to have their own proprietary design systems, for instance Shima Seiki sends people to Japan to learn the system. I would bet many compete on their software offerings — essentially these are industrial manufacture control systems, but they include design features, too. Super interesting space, but software seems to move very very slowly in the textile space as far as I can tell.

https://www.unspun.io/ seems to be trying this

Unspun is cool! I hadn’t heard of it before. They provide 3D weaving on demand, according to the site, which is the “other” clothes manufacturing technique — knitting is how, e.g. a sweater or more finely made t-shirts would be made, and the structure of the ties and loops in knitting provides that ‘stretch’. Weaving on the other hand shouldn’t stretch much, and would be used for, say, your curtains, jeans, or a dress that needs to fit exact sizes.

There are Japanese (and probably other) 3D in the round knitting providers, but I hadn’t heard of weaving done on demand and to spec — that’s pretty amazing.

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