@emery @alpenglow To me, knitting already feels like magic, but knitting *software* is 🤯. Even as someone that is good at geometry and can program, it breaks my brain a bit to think about how you would write software that does this.

It is unbelievably cool.

@chrishuck @alpenglow Right? Absolutely mindblowing that I can connect my laptop to a knitting machine made in the 1980s and make it do stuff. Well, I mean, I still have to physically make the knitting happen, but I can send the stitch pattern information to the machine. ;)

At one point, Husband wrote a little program for me that converts colourwork charted in Excel into a bitmap, where one cell = one pixel. I can put that bitmap into the knitting machine software and then send it to the machine so it selects the correct needles as I knit. (Why Excel? Because I worked in an office and that's what I had to keep myself from dying of boredom.)

@alpenglow @chrishuck Oh that's amazing! I would love to go on that tour some day :)

I'd've guessed that they would have moved to newfangled computerized machines, but I suppose if the punchcard machines still work, why bother? The old ones are probably easier to fix and maintain, too.