Last week I came across a White Easy Knitter for $25. The White Easy Knitter is made by the same company that made my beloved 1602, and is the same pitch (5mm). The Easy Knitter is a low-end hobby machine, and considerably simpler than the 1602, but the parts and accessories are interchangable. For $25 I wasn’t expecting it to be in great shape, but since replacement needles are about $1 each on ebay I figured it would be a good source for spare needles.

You may remember that my 1602 did not come with a full bed cast-on-comb, and I’ve attempted to make my own. My homemade comb works OK, but not great, and I’ve been keeping my eye out for an affordable replacement without much luck. I have yet to see one for less than $100 once shipping is factored in.

I’m happy to say that the $25 Easy Knitter came with both a full bed of 160 needles (all of which look to be in good shape) AND a full bed cast-on-comb. So that’s $260 in parts right there. The carriage for the Easy Knitter is sold as the intarsia carriage for the 1602, another $50+ part.  It also came with some weights and transfer tools which will work with the 1602. Most curiously and surprisingly, it came with an original copy of the 1602 manual. Most mysterious, since the 1602 manual really doesn’t apply to the Easy Knitter at all.

The condition of the Easy Knitter bed itself is OK. A few of the flow combs are broken, but that doesn’t really prevent it from being used. It’s a very simple machine compared to the 1602. I plan on stealing a few needles from it to replace some bent ones on the 1602, but will otherwise leave the Easy Knitter in tact. It’s considerably lighter and smaller than the 1602, and will come in handy if I ever get around to teaching another knitting machine class.

Overall I feel like I’ve won the knitting machine lottery, with a solid $300+ worth of parts and tools compatible with my 1602 for only $25.

The folks at EagleUp have written a plugin to help you generate 3D models of your Eagle boards. This could be handy for designing enclosures, or just feeling like a badass.

[Dangerous Prototypes via Make]

I spend a lot of time on my own photos for my blog, and a few of them have made the rounds on pinterest/etc. I’m contemplating watermarking my images with my blog URL. This isn’t because I’m concerned about “stealing,” in fact I love it when people reblog my stuff, it’s about attribution. It’s about someone seeing something I’ve done and having a snowball’s chance of learning more if they’re interested.

If someone wants a watermark-free copy for use on their blog or whatever, I’m more than happy to provide it. The image above shows what I’m thinking of adding to my photos from here on out.

So what do you think? Is the watermark shown above an acceptable way of “claiming” my content, or just it just distract too much from the image to be viable?

Wiring for Cat 6 Ethernet

It’s been a little tricky to balance what posts go where, especially when they’re home improvement hacks. The second post in the series about our home network is now up!

A script to generate a daily chore calendar

Because I’m a slob, I have to have a daily check list every day to tell me to clean up. I converted an old page-a-day calendar into a daily chore checklist, with help from Ruby and ImageMagick.

Why hard wire for ethernet?

Setting up a wired LAN in your house is somewhat unusual, because most people do just fine with a wireless connection. But it does offer some distinct advantages over an exclusively wireless network:

Faster network speeds and lower latency

We wired our house for gigabit ethernet (1000Base-T) which has a maximum speed of 1000 Mbit/sec –  about  20 times faster than what most people will get on a wireless network (54 Mbit/sec). This won’t do anything for your internet speeds, which are limited by your ISP (Comcast, Verizon, etc) at rates generally much slower than even a wireless network, but it will allow fast data transfer within the house which is useful for  shared file servers and streaming media to other devices in the house.

Latency is a measure of how long it takes for a packet of data to reach its destination. It’s different than bandwidth and matters more for live communication (online games, chat) than for downloads. Wired networks have considerably lower latency than wireless networks.

More reliable connection

Wifi signals are radio waves, which are subject to degradation for a number of reasons. Poorly shielded devices, such as microwaves and cordless phones, often cause interference with wifi connections. Other wifi networks in the area are also a source of interference, and in dense residential areas finding an available channel can be difficult. Even the layout / construction of your house plays a role in how radio waves travel.

Free up the wifi network for wifi-only devices

Wifi routers, particularly the inexpensive home models, tend to get saturated when there are too many devices connected. By taking our desktops and set top boxes off the wireless network there will be more wireless bandwidth for devices that can’t use a wired connection.

Why not wire for ethernet?

If a hard wired LAN is so awesome, why doesn’t everyone have one?

Cost 

Even if you do everything yourself the cost of wire, jacks, patch panels, and faceplates adds up (~$5 per jack + $100 per thousand feet of cable). You’ll also need a few special tools to terminate and test the wires, which can be an expensive investment for a one-time project. Then there’s also the issue of what’s managing the whole network. At the minimum you’ll need a network switch ($20 – $150 depending on size) and router (a home wifi router will do just fine). And few nerds can content themselves with just the minimum – we opted for a half-sized server rack full of various components.

Hassle of installation

No matter what shape your house is in, adding a LAN to an existing home will involve punching some holes in the wall. Depending on how your house was constructed, running wire can range from a mild hassle to a total nightmare. Some homes may be laid out in a way that makes running wires inside the walls impossible. If you’re not too concerned about looks and have a smaller home, you can run wires along the baseboards (they’re very low voltage so getting shocked isn’t an issue), but likely you’ll still need a few holes to get them all over to a central location.

My parents have an unfinished basement and reasonably accessible attic space, so running wires through their home was fairly simple. Our house has insulation inside even the interior walls, and no attic to speak of, making running wires a huge hassle that involved punching many holes in the drywall and fishing the wire out with a long cable.

Lack of flexibility

Unlike a wireless connection, your wired ethernet is stuck where you put it. If you decide later you’d like your computer to be on the other side of the room, you’ve got to run a long cable across. For this reason we’ll have both wired and wireless networks in the house. Multiple wifi access points plugged into the wired network will ensure the whole house has good wifi coverage.

 Our Network Setup

If wiring a house for ethernet is unusual, our network setup is downright excessive. But if you’re going to put the time and energy into wiring, you might as well go all the way, right?

Our internet comes into the house courtesy of Comcast and is managed by a mid-range  Buffalo consumer router. Originally we had planned to run a dedicated Smoothwall server, but our collection of old dead computer hardware was a little more old and dead than we were hoping. The Buffalo router runs an Open Source firmware called DD-WRT, which lets us do some advanced network management.  Two 24 port network switches are plugged into the router.

There are 34 network drops (individual lines) running from various rooms in the house down to a closet in the basement. These are terminated into one of two patch panels – long strips of RJ-45 jacks you can plug ethernet cords (patch cables) into. A patch cord runs from each jack in the patch panels into the network switches.

Throughout the house there are wall plates with jacks connected to the wires running into the basement. Each of our computers, printers, and video game consoles will be plugged into a wall jack. There will also be two wifi access points plugged in, one upstairs and one downstairs. The router we chose is a wifi access point as well, but due to its location (a closet in the basement) its signal likely won’t get very far.

Also in the basement closet is a Debian server which holds all our movies, music, and shared files. Each PC in the house has a program called XBMC which can stream audio and video from the Debian server. I’m debating throwing a TV tuner card into the server so it can act as a DVR and record television programs as well. If we ever decide to do smart home stuff (computer controlled lights, etc) we could run those off this machine too, though for now we’ve got quite enough going on.

Each component in our network – the cable, patch panel, jacks, switches, and even the network cards in the servers – is rated for gigabit ethernet speeds. This is important to note because gigabit ethernet is new enough that only about 1/4 of the available consumer hardware supports it. In most cases the gigabit version of a component is only a few dollars more than the 10/100Base-T version, and it’s all backwards compatible, but it’s an important thing to note when setting up your network. 1000Base-T is much faster than we need right now, but 20 years ago 10Base-T was considered superfluously fast and now it’s considered pathetically slow.

Our network is, if nothing else, over engineered. I stopped myself short of building the server with hardware RAID and went for two unmanaged switches instead of one giant managed switch. We’ve definitely run more network cable than we’ll use at any given time, but since installing the cable involves tearing up the walls I wanted to do it all before we move in and before the painters come. And maybe we don’t strictly need it, but the half-rack of server hardware in the basement sure looks sexy.

This is part 1 of 3 posts about our home network.
Part 2: Wiring the House for Cat 6 Ethernet 
Part 3: Coming soon 

I followed the technique in this video to build the house from the plans. Things won’t match inch for inch, but it gives me a pretty good idea of the layout and I can always correct the measurements later after checking them with a tape measure.

For the time being my house has no ceilings, and each floor is laid out side by side. Google SketchUp has a wide variety of furniture in their 3D Warehouse, and with a little practice I’ve started to be able to model my own furniture.

Ever since seeing this Billy bookcase hack on Pinterest, I’ve been kind of obsessed with creating a built-in shelving wall. Ikea has some pretty good planning tools, so I was able to design something I thought would work in the space.

Then I grabbed the Billy set from the SketchUp 3D Warehouse and started modeling it in the room. SketchUp’s rendering tools leave a lot to be desired so I started playing around with a demo of Twilight, a rendering plugin. Aside from some odd lighting issues, I think it gives you a better feel for a space than SketchUp’s line drawings.

One other SketchUp plugin that has been invaluable is Fredo6′s Round Corners. I used it when modeling the couches to make them look more couch like.

Clearly my 3D modeling skills still leave a little to be desired, but you get the general idea of the piece. It’s a Makenzie corner chair from Target, part of a sectional we’re considering getting for our TV room.

Thankfully we have some time before we have to start seriously thinking about furniture, since the carpets need to be replaced and we’ll want to put up a fresh coat of paint. The next few weeks will be spent coordinating various contractors (long distance), trying to get the house in shape for move-in well before the baby decides to show up.

It’s been super quiet over here, huh? It’s not that I haven’t been blogging, it’s just that I’ve been seeing another blog. In an effort to keep my hacking blog for hackers and leave the mushy personal details out of it, I’ve moved all posts on my huge upcoming life changes over to their own subdomain.

I wrote a longer post about the nuts and bolts of the transition over on offbeatmama.com (the only parenting blog I can stand), but the short of it is: if you’d like to keep up with my posts about cooking, home decorating, and sprouting a family, then you’ll want to add http://home.kellbot.com to your RSS reader.

So I set out to make my own. The comb consists of small metal teeth which go in between each stitch, and a rod which is threaded through holes in the top of the teeth to trap the yarn in place. I made a 12″ long test comb to see if it would work before committing to a whole yardstick worth of bobby pins and hot glue.

I purchased 4 packages of bobby pins and some wooden rulers at the local dollar store. I then arranged the bobby pins at 5mm intervals along the ruler, since the Superba machines are 5mm machines.

I used a second ruler (they were 3 for $1!) to make sure the pins were all at an even height and that they retained their 5mm spacing. Then I ran a line of hot glue along both sides to hold things in place.

To use the comb to cast on ribbing, you run the carriage/yarn across the needles to establish a zig-zag of yarn across the bed. Then you push the cast on comb up between each stitch, and run a rod through the top of the comb. This traps the yarn between the rod and the ruler below, letting you appropriately tension the yarn for the first row of stitches.

As you knit, the comb pulls the fabric down between the two beds. A weight is attached to each end to provide tension. In this photo, I’ve lowered the front bed to make it easier to see what the comb is doing. You can just barely see the small copper rod at the bottom of the fabric.

I used it to knit a gauge swatch for a sweater I plan on knitting soon. It’s a mini-cable rib pattern. The cables are worked by hand, which is pretty tedious though I’m slowly getting faster at it.

My dollar store comb is by no means as good as the real thing, but it works pretty well for $2 worth of materials. It has a few key issues which make it a little tricker to use than a normal cast on comb. First, the end of the bobby pins are just a little bit too wide, I have to set the bed spacing all the way up to 6 in order to get them to fit through. Second, the bobby pins get in the way of the holes used to hang the weights. And my DIY comb is nowhere near as durable as the steel one. But it works well enough for now.

While working with my Toyota 747 I decided to try and find a ribber for it, which led me to the Ravelry Knitting Machine Sales group. I did not find a Toyota ribber, but I did find someone in Brooklyn who was selling a White/Superba 1602. He was selling it at a reduced price because the electronic selector box was not functioning.

The Superba knitting machines, which were also sold under the brand names White, Singer, and Phildar, are really interesting machines. Instead of a main bed and an optional removable ribbing bed like most Japanese machines, the Superbas have two permanently fixed identical beds. This makes it much easier to get consistent, even ribbing.

Mechanically, the machine is in good shape. Stockinette stitch, ribbing, and jacquard patterning (done by manually moving the needles into place) all work well.

The selector box, which can be seen in Patrick’s photo stream, works by reading stitch patterns off mylar sheets. A photoresistor detects either a light or dark square and sends a signal to the machine which moves the needles accordingly.
In addition to maintaining a comprehensive site on Superba machines, Patrick also was kind enough to supply me with the users manual, service manual, exploded part diagrams, and logic flow charts for the electronics.

As soon as I opened up the machine and took out the circuit boards, it was clear things weren’t working properly:

I superglued the board itself back together, and then used lumps of solder to repair the broken traces. Jumper wires would have been better, but admittedly I was too lazy to get up and find a spool of wire.

Once the traces were repaired, Phooky helped me test the output voltages. Since it takes in 110V mains power, I was nervous to start poking at it by myself. But we only made the electricity arc between the multimeter probes once. Have I mentioned that mains power is kind of terrifying?

Anyway, of the four pins that connect to the card edge, two are tied together to ground, and the other two provide 24v for the motor drive (which feeds the mylar sheets) as 12v for the COP420 microchip.

Speaking of the COP420, my first instinct was to try to get a firmware dump off the chip and try to reverse engineer the firmware. Not that I have any experience doing that, but luckily Trammell does. Unfortunately, he found out that the COP420 is a mask-programmed device, meaning that the program is put into ROM when the chip is created, in contrast to something like the Atmega chips used in Arduinos. If you’re lucky, the “test mode” on the chip was initially enabled, making it possible (if somewhat of a pain) to read out the firmware.

The more I think about it, the more it makes sense just to redesign the selector box from the ground up. Most of the bulk and power of the box is related to the scanning and advancing of the mylar cards, which are adorably archaic but not exactly convenient. A USB interface would be vastly preferable, and would cut down on about 2/3 of the circuit. I need to do some investigating to see if the whole thing could be USB powered, eliminating the need for a separate power cord and bulky transformer.

Yeah, ok, I have a knitting machine problem.

At first I couldn’t get the I and II buttons to stay in place at all. After some disassembly and a lot of oil, we got things moving again and it works great. But I quickly noticed that the 3rd needle selector wasn’t working. So I started to disassemble the machine to figure out why.

With the top cover off you can see some of the neat mechanisms in there. The zigzag gear (right) physically moves the needle selector up or down the needle bed. This means if you have a simple shifting pattern like a zigzag or checkerboard, you don’t need a punch card at all. You can just move the zigzag back and forth with each row.

Each of the blue needle selector levers rotates down to catch a small lever on the bottom of the machine. When these levers are caught, they cause the corresponding shafts (anyone know what these are really called?) to raise, which then push the needle butts forward. The small red lever releases the needle selectors.

Getting into the machine was a little tricky, you have to remove the card and zigzag knobs to access all the screws. Thankfully there’s a useful diagram in the K747 service manual. With the knobs removed, you can see the discoloration of the plastic over the years.

I had to fully remove the needle bed from the machine casing to get at the needle selector levers. Unfortunately by that time my hands were absolutely covered in grease so I couldn’t take many pictures. But once I got it out, I could flip it over and see the problem part:

The two little tangs on the bottom of the 3rd needle selector have somehow broken off, though I’m really not sure how. Unfortunately disassembly/repair of that part of the machine isn’t covered in the service manual. I see two options going forward: 1) I can carefully disassemble the needle selector mechanism, 3D print a replacement lever, and pray to God that I can get it all back together again, or 2) Fashion some replacement tangs with Sugru and hope they stay in place.

Since option 2 doesn’t require completely disassembling the machine, I’m going to try that first. There are a lot of little springs and I’m not sure I have the dexterity to get them all back in place again. I’d also like to better document the machine teardown, so sometime in the new year I’ll recruit an assistant and take apart / photograph the whole thing.

In the meantime the machine works great, and I can come up with plenty of patterns that avoid the 3rd needle selector.