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knittingmachine

Brother KH-930e knitting machine

Adventures in communicating with the Brother KH-930e knitting machine!

Make your own cable

The kh930e is designed to work with a Tandy PDD1 floppy drive. We don't need it! Make your own cable to communicate between your computer and the machine. You will need:

Change 'polarity' of the FTDI cable

FTDI cables have standard 'inverted' TTL (zero is 3-5V and one is 0v) but the KH930E requires the opposite. Luckily its very easy to fix this by reprogramming the software.

You will need a copy of FTDI MProg (windows only) and your FTDI cable. Plug in the FTDI cable into your windows computer and install the driver that matches your computer best

Please read our detailed tutorial on installing the driver here then come back when the driver is installed

Now download FTDI MProg and run the program

Rewire the connector

  • Re-situate the pins from the FTDI header connector into the 2x4 connector. This chumby tutorial shows how to disconnect them from the original header.

Python code

Backing up patterns/dumping memory from kh930e to computer

  • Start up the disk drive emulator in the command line.
  • When "ready" lamp is lit, clear display with CE key, then prepare to save pattern data to "disk" by typing 552, then STEP.
  • Display will go blank and then "ready" and "pattern no" lamps will light up with the "track" number 1 in the display. Press STEP.
  • Machine will beep when finished, and the track data will now be in the "img" folder along with your emulator and other scripts.
  • The emulator also makes a handy file-01.dat file to make it easy to preview the patterns using dumppattern.py.

Creating new patterns

Putting new patterns on the machine

  • Start up the disk drive emulator in the command line.
  • When "ready" lamp is lit, perform a memory reset by pressing CE key, then type in 888, then press STEP key.
  • Clear display with CE key, then prepare to load new data into memory by typing 551, then STEP.
  • Display should go blank, then "ready" and "pattern no" lamps should illuminate. Press 1 to indicate which "track" to load from the disk drive emulator, then press STEP.
  • Machine will beep when finished. pick a pattern and knit as normal.

Troubleshooting

  • If the RAM data has been corrupted, the screen will flash "888" and the machine will seem unresponsive. Hold down INPUT and STEP at the same time, and when the display should change. Perform a memory reset by hitting CE, 888, STEP.

Outside resources


/home/ladyada/public_html/wiki/data/pages/knittingmachine.txt · Last modified: 2016/01/28 18:05 (external edit)