“Weaving on a loom is fun. I gave my son a simple loom for Christmas, and he wove an entire scarf on Christmas Day. This got me thinking about building a computer controlled loom, maybe one that could weave any pattern imaginable. I liked the idea of taking software back to its very origins with Jacquard and the original Jacquard Loom. I also new there’d be lots of interesting design challenges.
In mid December, TechShop had filed for bankruptcy. My annual Christmas Project was in full swing, and the loss forced me to “Cancel Christmas”. I was in shock. I’d been using TechShop tools/space for 10 years, and no longer having access to their lasers, Industrial Sewing Machines, etc was paralyzing. By Christmas day, I was starting to recover and was looking for a new project. Hopefully, one that could use the PCBs that I’d already designed for my canceled project.
I still had access to a 3D printer. Could I design a mostly-3D-printed loom that used the boards’ 3-stepper motor controllers and bluetooth LE? I’d give it a shot! The basic idea I had was for a 2-motor loom. One motor would sweep through a bunch of cams, and the other motor would set the position of each cam in turn.
I took the basic specs of my son’s loom as a good starting point for basic size/layout. His is a 10″ loom with 8 threads per inch, so each control section of the loom would have to be 1/8″ wide, and there would be 80 of these sections. An initial sketch of the mechanism indicated 7 parts per section, so the loom would have more that 560 moving parts that would all have to operate flawlessly time after time, row after row, 100s of times per piece of material. I told my friends up front that it seems impossible and that this thing was never going to work, but working on the design would be really fun and get me out of my post-TechShop project funk.
Now real weaving is an art that involves rhythm, consistency, and pattern. This would never be that. The time to update the cams would be too slow for any real rhythm, but there might still be some fun art and process to it, and stringing up the loom would be quick and easy in comparison to warping a traditional loom. I also had some ideas for programatic pattern generation. Wouldn’t it be neat to weave out something unexpected? Discovering it row by row? That sounded like fun to me.
A much faster system could be built with 80+ solenoids or something, but that didn’t really appeal to me. It would drive the cost way up and certainly wouldn’t take advantage of these circuit boards I had lying around.”