* Close to silent till one:40′s loud equipment sounds! *
Here is our Addi Express desk with smaller and Kingsize Addi Expresses. The Addis are driven by electrical screwdrivers driving 10mm nuts epoxy-glued onto the sawn-off crank of the Addi. The screwdrivers are controlled by PWM output by a BeagleBone Black.
Yarn is pulled by two LEGO tensioners controlled by a LeJOS system running on the NXT brick powering them. Rigidity is created by an elastic band pulling a swinging arm. The swinging arm’s deflection is calculated by gentle reflected from a piece of card hooked up to the swinging arm which has a gradual black-to-white fade printed on it.
The BeagleBone Black and the NXT brick are linked to the Dell Mini 9 notebook hooked in excess of the prime of the workbench. The Dell Mini 9 operates a net server so I can use the Nexus 4 phablet to control the tensioners and Addi Express motors.
The yarn is pulled up from a laundry bucket. I run the yarn by an previous CD blank in the bucket as a crude way of minimizing the effect of sudden inputs of slack into the yarn puller when a ball of yarn tumbles. With out the CD blank, slack can ‘ping’ the yarn off the wheel of the tensioner. The stainless metal yarn guides are designed from small lengths clipped off a wire coat hanger.
The pinch wheels at prime remaining offer a smaller amount of resistance to the yarn puller so that a swinging arm is pulled up by normal stress pulling. If for any motive the tensioner desires to reverse, the pounds of the swinging arm is plenty of to pull a smaller amount of extra yarn out of the tensioner to stay clear of it going slack around the drive wheel or wrapping the improper way around the drive wheel.
The two smaller PCBs are a DC transformer to move down 12V DC to 6V to drive the screwdrivers and a DC Motor Driver. The two screwdrivers are 3.6V screwdrivers driven by a PWM signal in between fifteen% and 60% responsibility (the tensioners battle to keep up beyond 50%).
I use the ‘Casting on/off’ web page as a “dead man’s tackle” for knitting. I use a low velocity for casting on so I can jog the loom around. I knit the initially few rows at low velocity and then bump the velocity up, going back to low velocity once again for casting off.
At 10-20 minutes to knit a hat or a scarf, it really is at the moment no faster than by cranking like billy-oh by hand. I am seeking to get it reputable plenty of to set it running and overlook it for 10-20 minutes, but it really is not really there still.
The PS3 Eye / LED floodlight on the smaller Addi detects loom placement by finding 6-bit tags on the loom’s purple uprights. It’s at the moment doing work nicely plenty of to placement the loom, but not still built-in with the knitting system.
[Update 2015-Jan-24] Added a ‘knitting program’ characteristic and examined it by undertaking simple knitting making use of positioning only. Conclusion – poor thought will work not very nicely: http://youtu.be/J4rAjE-W6yo
Post time: Jan-18-2017