How-To: Hacking the Brother KH-930e Knitting Machine

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By Becky Stern
Posted November 2nd, 2010
Category Craft, Knitting

Limor “Ladyada” Fried and I just finished up a extensive tutorial on hacking the Brother KH-930e knitting machine. We show you how to make your own cable for interfacing with the machine, then how to use it to put custom patterns on the machine without entering them by hand, as I had been doing previously (one excruciating pixel at a time). I made the above tessellating adafruits fabric and the dithering experiment below. Look out for a CRAFT Video about the knitting machine hacking this Friday!

Watch the CRAFT Video on the topic.

In the Maker Shed

6 Responses to How-To: Hacking the Brother KH-930e Knitting Machine

Emma Hall on November 2nd, 2010 at 10:19 am said:

Is that some QR Code fabric in the background of the last 2 photos?

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Becky Stern on November 2nd, 2010 at 10:31 am said:

Indeed it is!

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Leslie on November 3rd, 2010 at 2:23 am said:

I made a collection with a lot of gradient knits in it. It is really nice to work with. http://www.leslieeisinger.nl
To bad I didn’t find something about hacking the knitting machine. I thought it was to difficult and bought the original software. Which is very good en powerful, but expensive.

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Leslie on November 3rd, 2010 at 2:25 am said:

Does it work? Can you scan the code. I also tried it, but I didn’t get mine to work yet.

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chantelle on December 15th, 2010 at 12:48 am said:

I have a singer 560 that will not pattern, and I am assuming that the trouble lies with the electronics in the board. I know you can purchase dak (designaknit) and bypass the board, so would it be possible to do the same using this method of yours? I am not sure where the singer saves the pattern to, there is no drive like on the brother,so i guess it has internal memory on the board. Any suggestions would be great, as right now I have a defunct machine that I would absolutely love to put to good use.
thanks
beth

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Becky Stern on December 15th, 2010 at 5:16 am said:

I doubt you’ll find our code helpful. It does not control the rotary encoders directly, but works to put patterns on the writable RAM on board, and appears to use a nonstandard file format that Singer does not share. If your machine’s board is kaput, you could always replace it by looking around on ebay… and your machine should still be able to make garments (solids, stripes, etc) without the patterning ability. Best of luck!

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