Edge of Emulation: Game Boy Sewing Machines
"Today, cheap digitized sewing is the norm, but at the turn of the century, Jaguar sparked a sort of revolution by giving consumers affordable and easy to use equipment."
Actually, digitized sewing was already a thing in the USA during the 90s thanks to Pfaff's PC Designer. You connected via your computer's parallel port and uploaded patterns to your sewing machine via their Windows 3.1 software. This is also why Singer's Jaguar copy did so poorly: The American market was already saturated with PCD based patterns.
There's a cool python library for machine embroidery called inkstitch, but I love the idea of using a gameboy..
It seems like there could be some interesting ways to teach programming using machine embroidery. So, eg, kids program a pattern, and then get to stitch it onto a hat. Feels like an area with a big pay off right away, but also incredible depth (eg turning an image into a stitched pattern).
X range is absolute - needle position, Y is relative - feed.
I have a sewing machine, Janome calls it Decor Computer which is surprisingly good description. Under the cover it is a feed system, servos and quite a lot of electronics.
Overlocker (serger) on the over hand is purely mechanical marvel.
Nintendo has had a... weird relationship with textiles. There was also the Nintendo Knitting System: https://m.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=279935495445300
That Yoshi is horrifying. Must have been someone's internship project.
The Game Boy dock explains why so many of the old Singer Futuras had a ridiculous control panel jutting out front.
This is the weirdest juxtaposition i've seen on this site.
> Let me just say that the way these 3 machines handle everything is dumb. There's absolutely nothing intuitive about using 0x14 as a replacement for zero. There's absolutely nothing intuitive about using the previous Y coordinate instead of the next one.
Two simple explanations. The scheme of using some range of values like this where the midpoint represents 0 is known as a "biased representation". One advantage of it is that it's unsigned, easy to convert to an absolute value (just a subtract), but crucially, it can index into a table of linearly increasing values. This is exceptionally common in Japanese embedded programming that I've seen. The values aren't values, they're indexes into a table of subroutines, or loop counters.
The second one, using the previous Y coordinate, well, treat the command stream not as a series of points, but as a sequence of movements. Move needle (X) by this many, move the feed (Y) by this many. It clearly makes sense that the needle would use wherever the feed had moved to last. So I'm not sure what else you were expecting -- the processor could move the feed first, and then the needle, I suppose, but that's independent of how the "points" are specified.