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

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:

• FTDI cable
• 2x4 connector part number WM8036-ND on Digikey

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

• 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.

• Available on github
• Based on Steve Conklin's knitting machine code
• Includes scripts for emulating the floppy drive, previewing patterns, and converting images to new patterns.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• KH-930e manual - fill out a CAPTCHA to download the PDF manual
• Python pitfalls - helped spot a bug
• Troubleshooting Brother machines - includes how to do an 888 reset of memory
• Good forum post- includes what to do when all the machine will do is flash "888"
• Newton's Yarns - in Anaheim, CA, claims to carry Brother machines/accessories incl. KE-100 motor drive