18. Wildcard week¶
All this information is refered to Wild Card Week class.
Objective¶
Design and produce something with a digital fabrication process (incorporating computer-aided design and manufacturing) not covered in another assignment, documenting the requirements that your assignment meets, and including everything necessary to reproduce it.
To achieve this my friend and Fab Academy alumni Oye invited us to the MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics Space Systems Laboratory. I went with my Academy classmate Aleza Epstein.
The Machine¶
The “SWG-N2” series is a member of SHIMA SEIKI’s compact class of WHOLEGARMENT knitting machines. Are capable of producing a range of fashion accessories from gloves, socks, hats, mufflers, neck-ties and other small items, with no sewing or linking required.
Key Features¶
- Slide Needle
A flexible two-piece slider mechanism replaces the conventional latch mechanism and offer posibilities in both knitting and transfer never imagined.
- Auto Yarn Carrier
The yarn carriers together with the separate yarn holder allow the machine to work with up to 8 different fabric materials, or colors.
Image edited by Aleza Epstein.
The CAD/CAM Software¶
The machines has it own propietary CAD/CAM software that is specially developed to facilitate the design of 3D knitted parts.
It incorporates a series of parametric profiles for standard clothing, to make easier the desing process.
Here you can see the table that ask you the geometrical parameters that will define your socket.
And in this picture the software ask you basic information of how the part will be machined.
The you setup the type of knitting, fabric and color you are goint to use. The types of knitting are stantdard and defined by the machines software, and the fabrics and colors are each one asociated to a yarn holder a carrier, as you can see in the following image:
Fabrication¶
After you have defined all the key parameters in the software, you send the code to the machine.
Ooops!!! Problems :(
Some of the Needles were brooken soo the fabric got stucked between the yarn carrier:
Unlukily, they had to replace this parts, and for that, order more needles from Japan so as a result we just got half of a sock:
