Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Fashion
machine that can knit clothing from CAD files. It carries a low price point, approximately
$700, and knits a sweater in less than an hour. Digital fabrication of garments from CAD
files had previously been possible with other tools, but has been prohibitively expensive
for the hacker/DIY community. Thus this open source design of OpenKnit increases ac-
cessibility and affordability of such a tool. Online, OpenKnit hosts tutorials focusing on
using the software, learning how to knit, and replacing the microcontroller. The software
and the hardware are documented and modular enough for others to use and modify them.
OpenKnit aims to bring open source digital fabrication to the DIY fashion industry, give
hobbyists, fashion enthusiasts, and artists enough control to make their own fashion cloth-
ing.
One benefit of releasing OpenKnit with open source hardware is that the research and
design can be crowd sourced and, therefore, can evolve organically with and for the com-
munity. Additionally, the community of users will drive some of the use-cases, as the
hardware is modular and can be adapted to many different configurations for combining
3D modeling with fashion design.
Anecdote: OpenKnit
Gerard Rubio Arias
Walking around the corridors of the design university and seeing some
schoolmates from the fashion design specialty using old commercial
knitting machines from the 1980s, moving the carriage manually back
and forth for their assignments, made me wonder if I could find a way
to automate that process and make their life a bit easier. I started to
imagine which mechanisms could make it possible and how people
would use that capability. I mulled the idea around until one day I con-
nected with the RepRap project, and the OpenKnit project was born. If
it's possible to print objects from digital files, why not do the same
with garments?
I thought that someone would already have taken that step, but after
doing some research I couldn't find anything similar. There were too
many reasons to not start working on the project right away. I didn't
create anything new—a digital fabrication tool for creating ready-to-
use garments had been on the market for many years, albeit exclusively
