Right, so this is a
Mission star map of the night sky, it's a it's a little bit big
So it's a 2.8 meters tall by four point four meters wide, so
It's not a small thing to carry in your luggage on a plane halfway around the world. So it's 15 kilos as well
Yeah, there's a bit tricky getting on the plane
So we set up an
ESP 32 chip
Which is listening to a aw s IOT trigger. It's got an onboard Wi-Fi
So that blue light is actually telling me that it's having quite an edge to AWS yet
So it's just working its way through when the blue light turns off the main that's fine. Yeah, let me tell you about knitting
I I took a
Domestic knitting machine from the 1980s. We're talking really old-school tech here with a
32-bit
Onboard computer and and I hacked it to turn it into a modern-day network printer. So there's a few hacks involved with that one
so first of all
I used a Raspberry Pi 2
Interface between the onboard computer and my computer so there are three prize obviously sitting on the network and it's running a website
Which I can connect to with my laptop and in a completely different room
And then I can send it an image and it can process that image
Give me a preview of what it'll look like in the knitted fabric and then I can press print
and there's
there's still a little bit of work involved in actually getting the print started physically with a knitting machine you have to cast on it's
There's a bit of a process there, but once it's running
I've got a robot arm that's running it backwards and forwards
to actually perform the knitting and also built with with the help from my husband John Spencer, I built a
An automatic color changer so I can do multiple color meetings. Not just black and white like multicolored netting
On this on this old-school knitting machine. Normally they're designed
Kind of like a sewing machine in the sense that you sit there and you actively engage with the Machine
And you're constantly manipulating it in order to produce
The end result which is the Knitting
So in the efforts of automating it I took out an entire process of creating knitting patterns
So I extra crediting plan. I create an image and then the process will create the pattern for me
and then
yeah, and I've made the actual color-changing part which which means that I don't need to say with a knitting machine at all once it's
running one of my major contributions to the knitting to the
Machine knitting community was a whole new algorithm that I created to create one knit per pixel
knitting in three colors
So that's something that these machines would never previously capable of doing so create a whole new algorithm in order to do that
And I think the main reason why no one had done before is because it takes a lot of processing
To sort of think through the problem and get it working so I could I was able to create a few different
Algorithms and then I you know been the computer scientist
I tested lots of different algorithms and I came up with one that cake that had the best results
Which is the one you see behind me?
Oh there go this pices going off before this piece was actually finished
I entered it into something called REA IO, which is a three-day hackathon that my work runs for over three days every quarter
Which is amazing
And I am yeah, I did a call-out to get help is to light up the constellations
Mostly laptop covers scarves
Baby blankets. Yes. Oh, I've done it. I've done a few things. Nothing quite this big though
So this was a bit intimidating this particular project. I don't know too much about astronomy
I'm very much an amateur
but I plotted where the planets will line up on the actual knitting's they line up to a particular date and time and
I've been working on this project for a few months now
So it's kind of hoping that I would hit the deadline and I did actually hit it. This tapestry was installed
By or before 6 p.m
Friday the 31st which is the day that EMS opened this knitting was installed ready to go and the planets aligned at that time
I tell me could you see them always the car?
It was actually still daylight
But it didn't check that night and it took a few hours later and yeah the the moon was spot on the planets
We're pretty much in the right spot sir. Yeah, that was less satisfying
No. Oh, right. A few people have asked me that question. I I really want to keep it in the public domain somewhere
So I will be taking it home with me. So nothing's really finalized there yet
But yeah, hopefully people can actually come and see it and like, you know touch knitting
It's it's it's a it's a fabric it, you know people need to touch it. So
Hopefully today and public domain somewhere
It took a lot longer than I was hoping mostly because I was having a problem with
With the yarn getting caught on the left side writing in the color changer. So I mean yarn is a fuzzy fuzzy material