#257 – An Interview with Fabienne Serrière of KnitYak

Fabienne Of Knityak: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Recorded July 8th, 2015. Episode 257. An interview with Fabienne of Nitya.

Dave Jones: Welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Dave Jones from the EEV blog.

Chris Gammell: And I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics.

Forbes: And I'm Forbes and I like hardware.

Chris Gammell: Well, then you are in the right place.

Dave Jones: Tell us what you do. First of all, for a living, and then we'll get into the cool stuff you seem to be doing on the side.

Forbes: Oh, I'm doing all the stuff on the side at the moment for a living. Oh, okay, right. Before that, I was working as a Linux sysadmin building storage clusters for a managed hosting provider.

Dave Jones: Yawn. Sorry. That's pretty cool. I don't know. Yeah, to our audience, that's like yawn. Well, I built really, really big storage clusters. So they were pretty fun. All right. Okay.

Forbes: And right now I do hardware reverse engineering and I'm building a textile company that has its own hardware and software.

Chris Gammell: And that's sweet. Is awesome. Thanks. So textiles. Now, we should probably clarify here as well. So is it like e-textiles or is it all just normal? Not normal because I've seen them. They're not normal. They're awesome. Is it non-e?

Forbes: Yeah. Currently it's non-e, but I'm hoping to be able to knit eventually with conductive thread and do things with where the whole fabric is actually a sensor. That's what I'm actually aiming towards in the long run, but I can't do that until I have industrial machines. So that's what I'm working on right now.

Chris Gammell: So what is your, how did you get into all this stuff? I mean, even how did you get into hardware hacking? All, you know, I saw the old school, you were a former Hackaday writer, like back at the beginning. So that was, I didn't realize that, but how did you get started in all this?

Forbes: Yeah, I have a sneaky handle where you can't tell I'm a woman, but the whole FBZ doesn't really lend itself to gendering, which is fine. It's, so I started in New York City. I was living two blocks from World Trade Center. World Trade Center went down, was a shitty, I moved there two months before that happened. Oh, wow. And my job was actually five blocks from the World Trade Center, and I was the only one who could get there. So I went from intern to technical director at an audio facility, and I built the hardware, and I built all the servers, and built speakers, and yeah, went from just liking technology and audio to running Linux, making my own hardware, making my own circuits, and basically kind of leveled up in tech completely and sort of, you know, self-taught in electrical engineering.

Chris Gammell: Wow. And that was all, I mean, that was just from that-

Forbes: It was in a one, very intense one-year period. Yeah, I bet.

Chris Gammell: Wow. And so did the, was it like you were the only person that could get to it for an extended period as well? Is that why? Yeah. Really?

Forbes: Yeah, for about six months, nobody else could get in. Wow.

Dave Jones: Oh, really? Wow. It was that controlled, was it? Or did people just live far away?

Forbes: Yeah, no, this was like the closest circle, so they had three concentric circles from the World Trade, and that was the closest one. And actually, the first month-

Dave Jones: And you weren't allowed to travel from one circle to the next? How was, sorry, I don't know the logistics of what happened.

Forbes: Yeah, no, they just controlled it that you couldn't get in unless you lived there. Oh, okay, right. And I happened to live there.

Dave Jones: Got it.

Forbes: Okay, so you had to go through checkpoints

Dave Jones: and show your ID that you actually lived there, did you? Yeah. Okay, right. Oh, I didn't know any of that. Interesting.

Forbes: So it was simultaneously my therapy and my job

Dave Jones: to go in

Forbes: and just sort of nerd out hardcore just day and night.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's like an escape, right?

Forbes: It was my escape, yeah. And all that went on for six months. I think it was four months that they had the really strict controls. Right. And then, you know, but about six months into it, I became the technical director because I had basically rebuilt everything in the studio.

Dave Jones: Sorry, I'm going to ask more questions on this because I'm fascinated by it. I haven't actually heard this before, which is rather surprising. Was this to keep like sightseers out? What was the purpose behind it to let, you know, emergency crews, cleanup crews work?

Forbes: Yeah. To stop, right. It was to keep it, so it was just emergency crews, just the EPA, which they didn't really do much, but supposedly for the EPA, for the emergency crews and for, they kept saying so that they could rebuild the infrastructure because all the TV towers and cell phone towers were on top of the world trade on one of the towers. Right. And so you would see, I mean, for a year, we still had temporary trucks in the street with antennas and where they had basically pulled infrastructure back in.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that'd knock out a ton of infrastructure, of crucial infrastructure, wouldn't it? I didn't really give that a huge thought.

Forbes: Yeah, there was a huge subway hub right underneath that just recently reopened and so they were rebuilding all of that. So there was a lot of heavy construction going on.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Wow. So can you tell us more about, so you said audio stuff, but what were you, it was like an audio studio or was it something else?

Forbes: Yeah. Yeah, it was a weird audio studio slash art gallery where there was 16 channel audio but not in surround. It was, they were kind of placed sculpturally in the space and we invited artists in to come and make music on our system and then some of them performed live concerts with the computers and some of them, you know, made sound pieces that would play on a loop kind of thing and some of them were interactive with sensors and stuff like that.

Chris Gammell: That's awesome.

Forbes: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Fascinating. We're so not art people. Are we, Chris?

Chris Gammell: No, I play piano sometimes but I'm really bad. Oh, right, well, yeah,

Dave Jones: you're, well, I can play the dig a little bit, maybe. Oh, really? Kind of. Certified Aussie here. Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Chris Gammell: Oh my God. Oh, yeah. So, so that's, that's, that's what got you into it. I mean, that's, that's really cool though. I mean, like, so, and, and rebuilding that just from scratch. I mean, like you had to like just kind of tear it all down and start it back up again basically or how did that go?

Forbes: Yeah, well, it was sort of not really ever working and it was the chance. So, the founder was, I think, 81 at the time. 81 years old at the time when I joined and he lived in the building. So, it was just this 81 year old man and I basically reinventing how we were going to do the whole thing because it was the best time to go offline basically and re, rerun all the cable runs, rebuild all the speakers, redo all the computer systems, like how everything worked, like re, redo all the crossovers for the speakers and everything. So,

Chris Gammell: yeah, because you can't do that when you're normally performing, right? You can't, when you have like a slew of artists coming through. Yeah.

Forbes: Right. Because you, we would have to have artists in to be able to, you know, compose music in the space before they even performed and they would have to be, and they had sort of a four week residency with our programmers. So, each of them got a computer programmer assigned to them for the length of their residency. And so, those residencies, we, I mean, you couldn't really work around it. It really took four weeks to kind of make something useful in the space because it was such a weird space.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Wow.

Forbes: So,

Dave Jones: do you think you would have actually gotten into all of this eventually if this unfortunate slash maybe fortunate event for you didn't happen?

Forbes: I don't know. I mean, because that was also the period when I started using Linux and then BSD. So, I mean, that's, a lot of things happened at the same time. So, I don't know. And I started going to hacker conferences and all kind of sort of lined up for me in 2001. So, I don't know if it would have, it probably eventually would have happened.

Chris Gammell: Yeah,

Dave Jones: I know, yeah, no, totally. I just, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's,

Dave Jones: wondered if your life, if your life sort of be, it was heading in that direction anyway and this kind of sort of, you know, was the catalyst that.

Forbes: I think it probably was. I mean, I studied mathematics in undergrad so I had to code for that too and I had, I built an audio studio because I also, I have a degree in music so I built an audio studio and was coding in Max MSP before I moved to New York.

Forbes: right. Okay. So, I was doing a little bit of stuff but I definitely was not building my own electronics and yeah. And then I did, you know, I did a course at ITP because I was

Dave Jones: Oh yeah.

Forbes: actually studying at NYU at the time.

Dave Jones: sorry, I don't know what ITP is.

Forbes: It's a school at NYU. Right. Interactive Telecommunications Program I think is what it stands for.

Chris Gammell: That's right, yep.

Forbes: And it, it, it's, it's part of the Tisch School and I wasn't, I was studying at a different school at NYU but I was allowed to take classes over in Tisch and so I did my first, you know, interactive electronics project and breadboarded my first thing and. Yeah, that's what we want to hear. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of how I started and I had no idea that what I was doing was hard because one of my very first projects was this crazy thing using Cricut which was this indoor positioning system by MIT. MIT, some MIT, I think they were grad students and they had released open hardware for it and maybe it wasn't open, maybe we just requested it and they sent us the hardware, I don't remember, but we built an indoor positioning system for dancers to do this interactive thing with my friend Ryan and we had really low latency. We had like 20 millisecond latency from dancers movement to the audio or the light cues which is really fast and at the time there wasn't really anybody doing indoor positioning like that. Not like discreetly and where you could actually see where it was moving. I mean, people would kind of fudge it and make, you know, the whole pattern sort of change and you wouldn't really, you know, feel or see the movement but we did that really early on. Who did we have on Chris

Dave Jones: that did that where it wasn't Akiba? Was that? He worked on stuff like that, didn't he? Oh yeah, he definitely still works on stuff like that.

Chris Gammell: Was that positioning though? I thought his was more just like just RF transmission. No,

Dave Jones: I thought it involved positioning and things like that as well. I think, Fabs, you know Akiba, right? Low latency stuff. Yeah,

Forbes: yeah. Oh, his stuff's great and yeah, I think Akiba like also does, yeah, movement-based lighting and all kinds of stuff, not just for dance crews but all kinds of art. Right, cool. Yeah, but I think what's really cool is that if somebody's a beginner they have no idea if something's difficult or not. Right, yeah. I've seen this happen with other people's first projects that they're weirdly ambitious and then yet they still work.

Dave Jones: Well, it's pretty, it's much easier these days to do ambitious stuff whereas if you tried to do a lot of this 15, 20 years ago, it was, you know, it was much, much harder. That's true

Forbes: but I was pre-Arduino. I mean, 2001, we were using PC-104 computers strapped to the dancers' backs.

Dave Jones: Right, PC-104s.

Forbes: And they were, I don't, they were so clunky. I mean, I made housing for them but they were not pretty and, you know, I made these little like bolero jackets and they were kind of like strapped on there.

Dave Jones: strapped on the back as like a little mini backpack because if people don't know, PC-104 was like an ISA bus. If, well, if you don't remember PC-104, you probably don't remember the ISA bus but that was like before PCI and PCI Express, you know, the original IBM PC had the ISA bus, the industry standard architecture or whatever it was. That's what it stood for. And, and basically the industrial people went, well, this IBM thing's pretty much a big standard now. How about we sort of just rearrange that and convert instead of a plug-in cards, convert it to a dual in line pin headers and that, you know, with the same pin out but that became the PC-104. So you'd stack boards on top of each other just like, yeah, stack Arduinos and things now but it used the PC-ISA bus. Yeah. And, so those, so those boards you were using were probably, you know, 8088 processors or was it like a really advanced one like an 80386SX or something?

Forbes: I honestly don't remember. I do remember that I hacked laptop batteries to make them work with it.

Dave Jones: Nice. Nice. And,

Forbes: yeah, and then we had the MIT Cricket and we had, each dancer had their own IP address. I don't remember what we were using for wireless cards. I think we were probably running Debian on the little machines on each dancer.

Chris Gammell: Wow.

Forbes: Oh,

Chris Gammell: goodness. See, I feel like you can already be like the, you can be like the old person and be like, I remember back in my day when I had to load down a dancer with 20 pounds of equipment and I liked it. Oh, goodness. Yeah. So you were running a full, a full Linux stack but still had that 20 millisecond delay?

Forbes: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Wow.

Forbes: Yeah. I don't think I could, I probably couldn't even reproduce it today. I mean, it was crazy.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's really impressive.

Forbes: It was nuts.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Forbes: Yeah. I'm impressed with myself thinking back to it. It was kind of weird.

Dave Jones: Virtue pad on back.

Chris Gammell: That's cool. Yeah,

Forbes: that's how I got into electronics.

Chris Gammell: and so that was, that was a, has it usually been art focused or is it, you know, kind of been elsewhere as well, like, like industrial and other stuff like that?

Forbes: Yeah, I mostly do weird things.

Chris Gammell: Weird's good.

Fabienne Of Knityak: We like weird.

Forbes: So I've built like interactive massage couch that knows whether or not you're friended in a social network and if not, it gives you a longer massage to encourage you to sit with someone you don't know yet.

Dave Jones: As you do. Yeah. That's just, what's weird about that?

Forbes: Incidentally, it's also the first couch that ran CouchDB because we used CouchDB for the logging of all the events inside the couch. My friends at CouchDB were pretty excited about that later on. I believe.

Chris Gammell: Headlines write themselves, right?

Dave Jones: Pretty much. Finally, I'll kill her out.

Chris Gammell: What was the, I know I'm not supposed to ask this question. I always get in trouble for asking the question here, but. What was the point of this couch? I know the answer is always the same, but I have to ask it anyways.

Forbes: Yeah, we were, we were supposed to integrate RFID into an interactive piece for an event, for a conference. I think it was like 3,000 people.

Chris Gammell: Wow.

Forbes: And it was kind of a business-y conference that tries to think it's a tech

Dave Jones: slash art conference, but it was more

Forbes: business-y than that. But it was part of a hackathon and we had a budget and we were three of us who built it, so we just, we just went for it.

Dave Jones: Nice.

Forbes: That one was built with.

Dave Jones: So there's all these business hackers all colluding on the, that's not even a word, but on the couch, were they?

Forbes: They were later and there was a lot of, this was in the Netherlands, so there was. After the beer started flowing. Yeah, and there was a lot of like actual Dutch TV stations there, which was really strange. Yeah. And not a lot of podcasters or, you know, online anybody.

Forbes: so it was all mainstream media. It was all mainstream media and they were really confused about what it was. And our project was one of 12 really weird projects with RFID and so they were just very confused by everything. But it was really fun. Love it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So how fast did you have to build that kind of thing?

Forbes: That was a five day, five day hackathon I want to say.

Speaker ?: Wow.

Forbes: Yeah, it's, it was a hackathon put on by a group called MediaMatic, which is incidentally how I got into knitting machines later. So I built my first knitting machine project at a later hackathon from the same group.

Chris Gammell: Nice. Right. And you would, you also ran a, you ran your own hardware hacking thing at TorCamp or elsewhere. I mean, what's the hard hack?

Forbes: Yeah, hard hack was its own standalone conference event thingy. Oh, really? Okay. For three years I did it as a standalone event and then I started doing it as sort of a subconference of other people's cons. So this is

Dave Jones: actually your conference. Yeah. You conceived it and ran it.

Forbes: Yeah, it was mine.

Dave Jones: Logistically, how hard is that to do?

Forbes: It was pretty hard. I mean, luckily I was living in Berlin at the time and I had friends who had a space, the Seabase, which is a pretty well-known hackerspace in Berlin, but they, I had friends at the Seabase who were like, oh yeah, come throw your event at our place and we won't charge you and come do that.

Speaker ?: Oh,

Forbes: nice. And the year before that I had, I took over a space which was an office that used to be the French and Italian embassy on the main street of East, like East Berlin.

Dave Jones: Oh, does it have like marble floors or something fancy fancy like that?

Forbes: No, but it had a band of electronics in it because most of the building you couldn't go into because it was facing the, American embassy at the time before they moved.

Dave Jones: And so they

Forbes: didn't allow anybody to be in this back 40 kind of this building. So we were in the front offices of it for the first year. I think we were 50 people the first year and the second year when we were at Seabase it was like 200, 220 people over two days.

Chris Gammell: Wow.

Forbes: And it was all hands-on. The big deal that I wanted to do with it was I didn't think people were learning about hardware by going to a talk. So I thought, you know, slides are just not kind of the best way for people to learn with hardware that really needs to be hands-on. Even if it's a demo that's hands-on or even if it's, you know, you're working on firmware or whatever, I think you learn a lot more when you're participating and not just watching somebody talk about it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, definitely.

Forbes: So that's why I started Hardhack.

Chris Gammell: So like everything had to be interactive then, everything had to have like pass around the widget while it's being discussed, that kind of idea?

Forbes: Yeah, and most of it was all hands-on hardware workshops. And each time slot I made longer than an hour. So most time slots were two hours or three hours, which is the other thing. Yeah, nice.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's good.

Forbes: Because hardware takes a little bit more time.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, definitely.

Dave Jones: Yeah, because hardware's hard.

Forbes: It is. Yeah, and

Chris Gammell: there's stuff. But that's what makes it fun. There's atoms involved, right? So what happened to it? Because I'm, first off, I'm intrigued by the hardware scene specifically in Germany because I think that we hear about CCC and stuff like that and it seems like it's very big over there. But what ended up happening with all this stuff? Got out of hand.

Forbes: So the reason I started it, yeah, no, the reason I started it was because at the CCC at the time during the Congress, which is between Christmas and New Year's, there wasn't really enough space for hands-on hardware hacking at the event. I mean, there was to some extent, but there wasn't really a place to throw a workshop. There was space where you could bring your own hardware to work on throughout the event in the hack center, which is the area that they had designated for it. And so I had lobbied and lobbied and lobbied and eventually I said, well, okay, I'll just do my own con because my friend Florian, Florian Hotawa, was like, oh, just throw your own con. I'll help you do it. And so that's how the first year happened at those offices of the ex-Italian and French embassy. And so then after that, the CCC made enough room. And I say the CCC, I mean, it's a collective group of nerds like you and me. So it's just a really big group of nerds. So it's, you know, things move a little bit more slowly. So three years later, they ended up having enough space for hands-on workshops. And so I went and organized and brought in people to throw workshops and, you know, made sure, facilitated that there would be room for places where we could solder, where we could make a mess and have good ventilation and really good table lighting and have longer time slots and all of that happened. So since then, the CCC has had a huge, huge area for hands-on hardware hacking throughout the event.

Chris Gammell: Cool. Sweet.

Forbes: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I'm always a little disappointed just with the timing, just because I know that I'll never be able to get out to CCC because it's like right during family time, you know, like that time of year is my family, at least. I don't know.

Forbes: Yeah, I had my family pretty trained. My parents live in the south of France, but I had my family pretty trained that I was just going to bug out, you know, the day after Christmas. Yeah. So, they knew, they knew that I would come early and then leave early.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah, I was invited there and like, it was like, yeah, I would have had to leave because, you know, Australia's like a, like a day ahead. I would have had to leave on Christmas Day, you know, to like, to get to Germany. Would have

Chris Gammell: missed Boxing Day, Dave. I mean, you would have been

Dave Jones: whatever the heck that is. Christmas Day, I would have missed New Year's, yeah, the whole period, yeah. So, it was like, yeah, that was kind of vetoed. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah, Favs, can you tell us a little bit more just about the general, the hardware scene over in Europe? I mean, like, to be completely honest, we don't get a chance to speak to Europe as often just because the timing where Dave is in, you know, Sydney and I'm here. So, even in the UK, it's usually like midnight or one in the morning when we usually record.

Speaker ?: So,

Chris Gammell: harder for people that have always wondered that stuff too.

Forbes: Yeah, the hardware scene is huge in Europe. I mean, just massive, which is funny because you think, oh, you think Maker Faire, you think San Francisco, you think those kinds of things, but the hardware scene is really, really big in Europe.

Dave Jones: Whereabouts in Europe? Is there like one hub that's sort of like the de facto place to be?

Forbes: No, I don't think so. I mean... Is it because everything's so close in Europe? Yeah, I mean, everything's so close together, you can get, you know, you can ride the train and be in a different country in an hour, you know, so...

Dave Jones: Yeah, right. It's...

Forbes: And, you know, public transport is, you know, really, really good and... Yeah, exactly. We have, you know, cheap things like EasyJet and you pretty much can get anywhere really cheaply.

Dave Jones: For 50 bucks or something, yeah, you can... Yep, right.

Forbes: So, I mean, I see the usual suspects in all different countries. They pop up at all the different conferences or events or hackathons and stuff like that. I mean, I love the German scene because I love Germany and specifically I love Berlin, but there's a saying that Berlin is not Germany. Right. I mean, it's weird. It's like, it's the freaks. It really is the freaks and it's good... Austin is not Texas, right? ...assemblage of freaks. Right, yeah, yeah. Definitely, just like that. Just like that. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So is, is, would English be the de facto language at these or is there, is there a de facto language? Does it become the language of the country that it's being hosted in? What's the...

Forbes: Yeah, the, the, the main language is English, unfortunately. Right.

Dave Jones: Unfortunately? Yeah, well,

Forbes: I like languages and I, I mean, I speak French and English and I'm German now, learning Chinese. I think, I think languages are awesome, but no, the, the de facto language is definitely English.

Dave Jones: Okay, interesting.

Chris Gammell: She's trying to say that we get away with a lot, Dave. Only being single language dum-dums.

Dave Jones: Well, no, I've, but that's common in the electronics industry, the de facto standard is English. Yeah. I can tell you,

Chris Gammell: I feel super guilty when I went, when I was in Germany, I just, I know that like everybody speaks perfect English. I feel so guilty when I go to another country and I'm like, yep, hey, stupid American here. I kind

Forbes: of made a point to force myself to learn German. That's really good.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Forbes: I didn't, I didn't right away, I didn't speak any German when I moved to Germany. So, and I didn't take courses until 10 months in.

Forbes: my friends were, my German friends who are, I have some German friends who are visiting Seattle right now where I live currently and, you know, speaking German with them and everything and now I speak German. But at the time, even, you know, one of my friends who's here visiting me, she, you know, taught me my first word in German and that was, I don't like it, I want to say six months after I really moved to Germany.

Forbes: I took my time, but eventually I got there. I worked, I worked my last three jobs in Germany, completely in German. So,

Chris Gammell: oh,

Dave Jones: wow.

Chris Gammell: Interesting. How long were you there total?

Forbes: Eight years in Germany.

Chris Gammell: Nice. Oh, geez. Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's all.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Forbes: Yeah. So, almost all of those in Berlin. A year and a half in the middle, I was in Cologne.

Chris Gammell: Nice.

Forbes: All right.

Chris Gammell: What, so, what brings you back to, what brings you to Seattle then? The space natal, obviously.

Dave Jones: Obviously. Obviously the sunshine and weather, right? I'm sure.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right. Yeah.

Forbes: Yeah. So, I, my German husband and I took a year off and we kind of did a road trip through the U.S. and did Costa Rica and Hawaii. So, we took 11 months to kind of figure out where we would want to land if it were in the U.S. And we chose Seattle and that's where we ended up. And I just started a business here, which I am kickstartering. Yes. Yes, we'll talk about that. It's, that's kind of why I moved here. It's a lot easier and advisable if you can to start a business in the U.S. than elsewhere.

Chris Gammell: Interesting.

Dave Jones: So, why is that? Is it a tax thing? Yeah. Is it a

Forbes: market thing? Yeah, how easy it is to set up a company, the support you'll have. So, locally in Seattle, I have Seattle Small Business Association and Seattle Score. I have a free CPA through them and he's top notch. Oh, really?

Chris Gammell: Score, that's the mentoring organization?

Forbes: Yeah, yeah. So, that makes a lot more sense. If I want to do shipping logistics, it's a lot easier from specifically Seattle. So, stuff like that. That's why I moved back.

Dave Jones: Awesome. Interesting.

Forbes: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's a very informed decision, it seems like. That's really good.

Dave Jones: Why shipping-wise?

Forbes: Is it

Chris Gammell: easier?

Forbes: Well, we have Amazon here, so shipping pipelines are pretty easy from Seattle specifically.

Dave Jones: Right.

Forbes: I don't know if it's because traditionally it was the actual shipping hub because we have this huge port, but Amazon's here now.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, and you guys make all the airplanes too.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Yes.

Chris Gammell: Boeing is here.

Forbes: SpaceX is moving an office here. Fluke is there. There's a lot of... Fluke is here. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of Bay Area startup transplants here, so because it's currently cheaper than the Bay Area.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. Anything's cheaper than the Bay Area. Yeah, well, you'd be

Forbes: surprised, but...

Dave Jones: Maybe not New York. Yeah.

Forbes: No, but the housing market is spiking right now in Seattle because of all the tech coming in. Right.

Dave Jones: Interesting.

Forbes: In the last two years, especially Amazon growing so quickly with AWS and everything. Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And the drone delivery. Oh, yeah, I guess you could start to, you could deliver textiles via drone.

Forbes: I could do that.

Chris Gammell: Drone wearing a scarf.

Forbes: Yeah. Nothing to

Dave Jones: say here at all, folks.

Chris Gammell: Okay, so let's hear about this. So I am very interested in this, both how you get started with it. I guess you mentioned a little bit, but what were some of the early textile things you started doing with the math and the, the, is it knitting machine? Is that right?

Forbes: It's a knitting, it's a knitting machine. So I started out with a consumer knitting machine as part of an art project with Travis Goodspeed and Arian Sharpenes. And we, in four days, I think, built a top-scroller 8-bit video game with dinosaurs and banjos. And the winner's, the winner's panel was knit off of a hack knitting machine. So, I had,

Fabienne Of Knityak: yeah, it was

Forbes: pretty cool. So it was like pixel art in, you know, knit, and then it was in this big window of the art space where we were. And we used the existing hack from Steve Conklin and Lady Ada Lamorfried and Becky Stern. they had released a hack for the brother KH930, which is a knitting machine from about 1983. And currently, there's one company left making knitting machines called Silver Reed for consumers, but it's really, really crappy. Like, nobody really uses it. People still use the old ones from the 80s because they're battle axes and they work.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So what is this one that you want to buy?

Forbes: Yeah, so I

Dave Jones: This monster thing, it looks like it needs a warehouse to fit in.

Forbes: It does. So I actually have a light industrial space lined up to put it in in Seattle because it's also very loud and I'm going to be running it 24 hours. It's an industrial

Dave Jones: It's an

Forbes: industrial knitting machine. I can't say the brand because they aren't sponsoring me. They... Of course you can. There's only two brands anyway of industrial knitting machines. So I really want them to sell it to me. So I'm trying to not anger them in advance. So I won't say their name. How could you anger them when you're giving them money? It's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. It's the machine costs over $60,000.

Dave Jones: Ouch. So it's a

Forbes: pricey machine. I mean, I don't know what a pick and place costs nowadays, but it's up

Dave Jones: there. It's up there. A half decent one. Yeah. Yeah. It's about the same.

Forbes: Yeah. So this machine can, the one I'm trying to get is fully automated. Set it and forget it, walk away, and it spits out finished knitwear. it's a huge improvement from the hacked consumer knitting machine, which costs about $800, give or take how many accessories you have used on eBay from 1983. It costs today $800. So it's a big upgrade from that because it can cast on and cast off by itself, which is the first and last row. the first row you can do on the consumer knitting machines, but it's really fiddly. And the last row you can't do on a consumer knitting machine at all. You have to do it kind of a sewn bind off by hand. Right. So it's something where I could actually sell algorithmic knitwear. So I

Dave Jones: started... Right, so you can just feed a file in. Like, is it easy as feeding in your file and out it pops?

Forbes: It should be.

Dave Jones: It should be.

Forbes: Again, I don't want to anger that company that I'm trying to buy the machine from, but currently their user interface is rudimentary.

Chris Gammell: So hacking moving mods is the idea.

Dave Jones: Right.

Forbes: Hmm, I'm not allowed to say that either because I really want them to sell me the machine. I see.

Chris Gammell: I mean, that's okay. But I was wondering about that if you'd have to fiddle with it.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Forbes: Yeah, but I am going to add other add-ons to the machine, which they can't get upset with. So other things I'm going to add on are, yeah, so a whole basically engineering tool chain for the front in software.

Dave Jones: Oh, nice.

Forbes: And probably extra things like tensioning devices for all the spools of yarn, the cones. I thought it would have had that. It has it, but it's not, it doesn't really do feedback in real time. So if there's a, oh, jam ups and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Forbes: Yeah. So if you have a cone of black yarn from one dye lot and one from a different dye lot, but they're both black, they're actually going to have different stretch properties depending on how black they are.

Chris Gammell: Really? Right. Yeah. So the amount

Forbes: of dye on the fiber actually causes it to be less stretchy.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah, I can picture that.

Forbes: So that's the sort of things that people aren't really doing. And this is why you can currently buy 5,000 of exactly the same scarf. So if I were to produce something in China, I want 5,000 of exactly the same scarf in acrylic, no wool, no nice cotton, no nice materials, just acrylic. I can order those for a dollar a scarf.

Fabienne Of Knityak: Oh, wow. But it's 5,000

Forbes: of exactly the same scarf. And the reason that is, is because the setup time on the machine is so long for each new thing that they knit, whether it's a scarf or whether it's a sock or whatever they're making, that they have to knit 30 test knits, test prints, if you will, that come out of the machine, figure out which one's the best, and then use those settings.

Dave Jones: Yeah. This has direct parallels with pick and place machines. It's exactly the same thing. It does? Oh, that's great. Take ages to set up. You have to do a little pilot production run to make sure everything's programmed right and all the orientation's correct and blah, blah, blah, and make sure there's all sorts of things. It's exactly the same.

Forbes: It's fascinating. So, yeah, that's what I'm hoping to do. I'm hoping to bring them into more of a CNC style factory something, rather.

Dave Jones: That's awesome.

Forbes: And you've got

Dave Jones: 14 days left on your campaign.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yes. And you're 40% of the way there. I'm 40% of the

Forbes: way there. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Does it look like what's it trending towards? Does it look like you're going to make it? It's going to be tight.

Forbes: It's going to be tight. I really hope it makes it. Everyone, jump

Dave Jones: on board. She'll send you a custom electronic. Can you get any pattern? Can people get like circuit pattern scarf

Forbes: Eventually, in the first round, I'm going to be doing elementary cellular automata, which is a mathematical pattern.

Fabienne Of Knityak: Yeah.

Forbes: Elementary cellular automata. It's a very simple algorithm that produces an image using the rules from the previous rule.

Speaker ?: I actually do

Forbes: know a bit

Dave Jones: about that. Yeah. Yes, it does. Yep. It simulates life form growth and replication and stuff like that, right? This was big back in the 80s. People would do, on the early PCs, they'd write cellular automata software programs to simulate growth of little, you know, of little cellular organisms and they replicate into different patterns and things.

Forbes: Yeah, that's more Game of Life. I know about

Dave Jones: that.

Forbes: Game of Life, which Conway's

Dave Jones: Game of Life, yep.

Forbes: That's more of a two-dimensional cellular automata, but the one I'm using is a one-dimensional, which means it outputs a 2D image, whereas Conway's Game of Life is a 2D plus movement.

Dave Jones: Right. Yep.

Forbes: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Got it.

Forbes: So it outputs a pattern. I'm doing it so that no two scarves are the same, so everybody gets a unique one. And some people have their favorite rule. There's 256 rules. Some of them are mirror images of each other, so there's not 256 completely different rules. Some of them are really interesting. Rule 110 is actually proven to be Turing complete.

Chris Gammell: What does that mean, sorry?

Forbes: By Matthew Cook. Oh, it means it's capable of universal computation, so you can build a computer out of it. This really, really simple system with these cells is Turing complete, which is really cool. You don't want your web app

Dave Jones: to be

Forbes: Turing complete. You don't want your web app to be Turing complete. That means an attacker can make it do all sorts of things it wasn't maybe designed to do.

Chris Gammell: And why is that?

Forbes: You what?

Chris Gammell: Sorry, I know. I get to play the game all the time. It's okay.

Forbes: No, it's fine. Yeah, Turing complete means you can make a universal computer out of it. You can program it, so to speak.

Chris Gammell: So, okay, can you play that web app idea out a little bit more? So, if you had a Turing complete web app, what?

Forbes: That means it's very attackable.

Dave Jones: Somebody can hijack it and make it do nasty things.

Forbes: And not just, yeah, so they can basically get into your server, which you don't want them to be able to. You want them to just be able to load your web app.

Dave Jones: They can get in, they can reprogram it to make it do anything and have back doors. It just makes the

Forbes: attack surface becomes really, really large. So, not just cross-site scripting, but any kind of input validation is probably totally wrong on it. So, you could get in and wreak all kinds of havoc. So, you really want your programs to be dumb, simple, stupid, and have all kinds of really good input validation when you write anything that's going to be facing the internet.

Dave Jones: Got it.

Forbes: Yeah, and then this pattern that I can knit on a scarf, the fact that it's Turing complete is really exciting. So, it doesn't just exhibit chaos, it exhibits these things called spaceships, which are these forms that move across.

Dave Jones: Yes, I've seen those. Yes, they're awesome. They actually move autonomously across the surface of the pattern when you simulate them. Yeah. Yep.

Forbes: So, in Rule 110, there are these spaceships that move across the scarf, which is a 2D image at the end, so it's static, but you can see it moving down the length and moving across. And those are what Matthew Cook used to prove that Rule 110 is Turing complete. Interesting. It's a

Dave Jones: really, really weird paper. I think he's spaced out. He's so confused. No, see, you've got to read the book Chaos by James Gleek. You've got to read that. That'll fill you in.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: I believe it's in Chaos. Anyway. So, Fabs, where are these?

Chris Gammell: So, you have the code online, right? Yeah. Oh, so the rules are part of the cellular autonom... Yeah. Automata? Automata. I can't say that either. These are coded in, you're saying? Is that the idea?

Forbes: Yeah. So, the rules are basically an 8-bit code. So, you have a binary number that you start with, and the binary number is what the rule is called. So, rule 110, you start with 110 in binary, and that's your rule for how the cells behave in the pattern. Yeah. And some of them have really interesting properties. So, like, rule 90 is actually, has the potential to be Sierpinski's triangle.

Dave Jones: Hmm.

Forbes: And then rule 30... Dave, no mathematicians on the program. I'm sorry.

Dave Jones: I at least have some clue what she's talking about. Resistors, Dave. We need to have someone

Chris Gammell: on that just talks about resistors. I need, like, a reset here.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: This is so cool, but I have no... I mean, this is really good because I need to learn some new things, apparently.

Forbes: Well, what's cool is that each scarf is different, and they look interesting. They don't just look like static or noise or something.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah, I'll post the link to the wiki page, too, because I'm looking at all these. It's the random initial state on this page, and it's just showing kind of the ability of patterns here. So you're saying you can do any of these? Is that the idea?

Forbes: Yeah, and then each rule, if you give it a different seed row or a different width, you have different outputs. So the examples I did on my Kickstarter page, I show rule 110, and then there's 13 or 15 different iterations with just rule 110 in the same width with different seed starting rows, and they all look different.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That is really cool.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's nice. Did you know that scarves, knitting pattern, like coated things into scarves, actually dates back to World War II? I didn't know that.

Chris Gammell: I didn't know that either.

Dave Jones: There you go. Here we go. I am an expert on this. As it turns out. Apparently during the World War II, the Belgian resistance, they actually encode, they got grandmothers to knit coded information into scarves so that they could actually smuggle them out. Really cool. And they actually got away with it. And apparently you can put up to like 120 bytes of characters knit into a scarves. So they were knitting like Morse code and all sorts of stuff into these scarves. And that's how they actually got, yeah, information out. Cool. The Belgian resistance. There you go. The reason I know this is because I went to the Ignite talk in Sydney a couple of months back and there was this girl who did this talk on exactly this. She actually knits her own scarves and she did a self replicating mitten where it actually has the, it has the QR code knitted into it for, and the QR code goes to the source code for the mitten. So it's a self-replicating mitten. Yeah, yeah. And it's mitten's all the way down. Very cool. Very cool. Oh, I'll have to send you that video. You will love the talk. Cool. Fabs, you'll just, yep. Yeah, I did a. Just remind me at the end.

Forbes: Yeah, I did a collaboration with Sam Urhead where he put a QR code on his hat and the linked to the pattern for how to make the hat.

Chris Gammell: That is really cool.

Forbes: And we made it, we made it completely creative comments. So the rest of his hat had snowflakes that were in the public domain and just all kinds of stuff. It was really cool. So he, and he made a beautiful video about it. You can look that one up too. Great. It's from, he did a whole year of open source. So he, for a whole year, he tried to use everything in his life to be open source from things he ate and brewed to things that eat. Which is a really cool idea.

Chris Gammell: That is very cool. Awesome.

Forbes: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Could you tell us a little bit more about the, the original, so the brother that you're using right now, like what were, what were like the, what's the actual interface to that right now?

Forbes: Yeah. So it expects a floppy drive. But I emulate a floppy drive in the terminal with a little bit of hardware. And so then I'm completely in the command line talking to the machine and it thinks it's plugged into a floppy drive. Excellent. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So you can just then feed it files and then it prints.

Forbes: Yeah. It had a maximum memory of 200 pixels wide by 66 long. So for a wrap, which is like a really wide scarf, I had to load seven or eight images into the machine to make the whole length of it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right.

Forbes: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And what's, what's the turnaround time on one of those things? I mean, like, is it, is it actually that the brother couldn't do, it couldn't do production style? Is that the idea?

Forbes: Yeah. So it's hand crank. You pull, you pull the, you pull.

Dave Jones: Bob's here and I'm exhausted getting through your Kickstarter awards. And steam comes out of it. Yeah. It's like big wheels turn.

Forbes: Yeah. You crank the carriage across the bed of needles by yourself. Right. And because I was using double bed, which uses a smart bed that's controlled by the microcontroller and my emulated floppy drive and the double bed that's dumb, that's just purely mechanical, that has a pattern on the reverse side. I have to manually change colors at the, every other, the end of every other row.

Chris Gammell: Oh. So there was no

Forbes: automated color changing and it was, yeah, and it was hand crank. And the machine is really fiddly as far as the left-hand side would constantly drop stitches or not change the color properly. So you have to really baby it. So it would take, for the wrap, I think it took me about eight or nine hours hands-on on the machine.

Chris Gammell: Yikes.

Forbes: And then about three or four hours to cast off the last row by hand.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's a slow Kickstarter award.

Forbes: So that's why I'm upgrading to an industrial knitting machine. Right, right, right.

Chris Gammell: So can I ask another question about that then? Yeah. How hard would it be to build, like, would it be, like, impossible to build one of these manually, the actual knitting machines?

Forbes: No, I mean, there are people who are building open source knitting machines. They aren't color changing yet, so you can't knit patterns into them. But there's a really great one. I'm trying to remember the exact name of it.

Chris Gammell: Loom? I know the, I think I've seen them around here.

Forbes: No, it's a knitting machine.

Chris Gammell: Oh, sorry, I don't know the difference.

Forbes: Oh, a loom is weaving, where you have threads that you've already pulled along a bed ahead of time, and then you weave a second thread through those existing threads.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay, okay.

Forbes: Knitting is one continuous thread that makes these loops that loop into the last row.

Dave Jones: And it builds up one row at a time, right, if I can, if I'm using the right terminology.

Forbes: Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Forbes: So it's, you know, knitting is, you can think of it as one continuous set of loops that are looped into the last row.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Got it. And how does it do that mechanically? I want to know, like, I want to see this machine operating, all the guts inside operate it, like, I can just picture like arms, robotic arms going around each other and twisting into knots and how does it work inside or is it impossible to explain? You have to, you have to see it.

Forbes: Well, it's, even if you see it, it's still complex enough that you're like, wait, how does that actually work? So I can explain. So there's a bed of needles that are flat and they have hooks at the end that look like crochet hooks, but it's actually knitting. And those, a carriage has a set of pathways on the back of it with metal switches that you can switch kind of like, it kind of looked like pinball flippers.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Right.

Forbes: And there are all different kinds of settings on the back of it. So if you turn the carriage over, it's really complicated mess of mechanical switches. And on the machine side, there's magnets and a rotary encoder that talk to a microcontroller and a microcontroller tells it what, how to set the needles for the next row. So it does what's called needle pre-selection, which is specific only to the brother machines. The other consumer knitting machines select on the same row. They don't pre-select for the next row. And the reason that's important is because once you can do that, you can manipulate the dumb bed of needles to the opposite of the front bed of needles because it's for the next row. So you can actually set things that will affect the way things happen rather than things happening in real time, so to speak, I guess. I wouldn't call it real time, but. So you're saying

Chris Gammell: you can control the future?

Forbes: You can control the future. So yeah.

Chris Gammell: The future is not set. That's what you like. Then it basically drags across these stationary needles and then that's what actually does the.

Forbes: With the magnet, with the rotary encoder and a magnet, it pulls the needle forward or not, depending on what the color is supposed to be for the next row.

Chris Gammell: So how long does a single row take, like when the machine's going across?

Forbes: Oh, that's quick. That's like, that's one row. Oh yeah, okay. But there's a lot of rows involved in making a scarf, unfortunately.

Chris Gammell: No, that's really interesting.

Forbes: It's faster than hand knitting.

Chris Gammell: It's faster than hand knitting. Right, yeah.

Dave Jones: So the idea is to set up, the idea of the Kickstarter is to actually set up a knitting, a custom knitting manufacturing company. Correct. Park for textiles. Kind of like the

Forbes: Shapeway of textiles. Shapeways of textiles. Right, okay. Shapeways of textiles.

Forbes: for textiles.

Chris Gammell: We're not trying, we don't have any money to give you here, Fabs. Sorry. You don't even say Uber. That only works on investors.

Dave Jones: Be careful, there could be riots in the street. Those French people, right? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's really, so, are there, is there anyone out there doing custom at all? I mean, I know you said that it's really cheap to do, you know, standardized stuff from China.

Forbes: There are a few. There's one in London who are doing, they aren't doing custom yet. You can't upload your own designs or anything, but they have kind of a web app thing where you play with a pattern with your mouth and kind of distort it and stretch it and play with it. So you can, like, make a funky swirly houndstooth or, you know, some kind of weird standard fashion thing. Stripes that are stretched and tweaked and that you tweaked yourself and then they'll knit it for you. Okay. So they're doing that and they just got a big chunk of funding. I think they just got an equivalent of a three million US dollar seed round two weeks ago, three weeks ago, something like that.

Dave Jones: Wow.

Forbes: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And it's that limiting? And they still got money for that? Yeah. Sounds pretty, yeah.

Forbes: And there's a secret project at Disney, which...

Chris Gammell: Not anymore.

Forbes: ...became not so secret because they sent out a job that they were looking for PhD students that do computer science to program knitting machines.

Dave Jones: Oops. Dead giveaway. Someone in the HR department screwed up, huh? Yeah.

Forbes: So that...

Dave Jones: Yep.

Forbes: So they're working

Dave Jones: on that. So all the PhD knitting students are all fighting tooth and nail to get a job at Disney.

Forbes: I think it was even... I think it was an internship for PhD students, which is crazy that they would try to hire somebody for that cheap, but...

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Forbes: Beyond that, there's Nike. So Nike has a research lab and they do a fully knit upper with an industrial knitting machine. They are...

Chris Gammell: On a... That's like the upper is the tongue of the shoe? Yeah.

Forbes: No, the whole top of the shoe.

Chris Gammell: Oh, really? Oh, okay. Oh, so they can

Dave Jones: do custom shoe.

Forbes: Yeah, well, they aren't doing custom shoes yet, but I think they're trying to aim for that.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Forbes: As I release all of the industry secrets, you know, all over the podcast. They are... But they, again, they have to test even if they go from a size 8 to a size 9, they don't have a way to scale up in software. Yeah. They have to knit 10 test pieces to make sure that the size is correct. Oh, wow. But what's cool is they're knitting textured stitches, so it's knit on a flat knitting machine, but when it spits it out, it pulls its... The knit stitches pull it into the shape of the top of a shoe.

Chris Gammell: Oh.

Forbes: Right. So it's... Interesting. The way they have like ribbing stitches and cable stitches and stuff to pull it all together into a 3D kind of shape on the top of a shoe.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So you're using wool on yours. Is there... I mean, is it possible to switch in other like finer resolutions and stuff like that? Like it will eventually be able to get like tighter resolutions, get actual patterns, not actual patterns, I mean like if I wanted to print my face on a scarf like in a repeating pattern.

Dave Jones: Right now you could... I can just picture him at the next make-a-fair walking around there. Hey, look at me. Yeah, you could. I mean, you could. It would be pretty

Forbes: pixely right now. Uh-huh. It's not the material that you use so much as the actual machine. So the machine I'm trying to get is more of a universal size I would say for the knitting stitch. Yeah. But it's smaller, has a smaller space between the needles and smaller needles than my consumer knitting machine. So it will be finer than what you see in the Kickstarter.

Chris Gammell: So my...

Forbes: I don't know how much finer. Currently I have about 61... I have 61 stitches across for a scarf. And I think that the industrial knitting machine is going to be somewhere more like 80 stitches across.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Okay. So still maybe a little blocky but you can do... Yeah. Yeah. A pretty good range there. That's interesting.

Forbes: Finer than hand knitting. Oh, yeah. Because the consumer... Even the consumer knitting machine is finer than what I usually hand knit. Yeah. Even lace weight. I'm also a hand knitter. I didn't mention that at the beginning as I've angered every hand knitter who's listening to this.

Chris Gammell: I learned how to hand knit at one point. I've forgotten it all but I learned at one point. It was pretty cool. It's like soldering.

Dave Jones: Did you learn it from your grandmother?

Chris Gammell: I did, of course. I'm sorry.

Dave Jones: It's like soldering. You could never forget.

Chris Gammell: No, I forgot pretty quick. Something about purling. Pearls. Something about pearls. I don't know.

Dave Jones: Knit one, pearl two. Knit one, pearl two. Yeah. So, what are the plans beyond the Kickstarter? Are you looking to get more funding than that or are you just happy to get your machine and start running?

Forbes: Getting the machine is a really big deal for me because I've been working on this for four years. The Kickstarter campaign I've been working on for about four months before it launched. But the... Yeah, they're not easy, are they? No.

Dave Jones: People think you can just slap it up there and...

Forbes: No, it's a roller coaster. It's crazy. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Forbes: But I did get posted in Boing Boing yesterday and Design Milk today so those are good.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah.

Forbes: Good traffic producers and I got... I'm in Glamour Magazine and Scientific American which is a really weird mix. Yeah. Yeah. So... Who knew that fashion and math could really go together? Yeah, it crosses over

Chris Gammell: that threshold of... Yeah, yeah, it does. A lot of... Everybody knows what a scarf is as well. Like, right? I mean, like, there's some... That's true. It's like, oh, I have a, you know, little widget and people are like, I don't even know what that's used for. So... People know scarfs so that's a good start and then the... Yeah. You get the math people that confuse the hell out of me and the coders and hardware people.

Dave Jones: I'm sorry to say but you probably won't get much business from Australia. Oh. So many backers from Australia. New Zealand though.

Chris Gammell: It's cold there.

Dave Jones: Oh, it's pretty cold in New Zealand. Yeah, yeah.

Forbes: Yeah, the other...

Dave Jones: But don't... Yeah, we just... Scarves, no. They're just not really a done deal here.

Forbes: Yeah, I'm hoping to... I mean, I love tropical areas. I was in Costa Rica for two months in December and January and Hawaii for the month of February. So... Eventually, I'm hoping to do... Have a terrycloth machine which is a machine that makes towels.

Dave Jones: Oh, nice. Oh, yes, nice. I'll take one of those, please.

Forbes: Yeah, so not printed on but actually...

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah.

Forbes: Knit or woven into the terrycloth so you have the pattern.

Chris Gammell: That'd be awesome. That'd be great.

Forbes: Hoping to do that eventually. I would really like to do socks. There's colour-changing sock knitting machines.

Dave Jones: I would have thought... Or is it just me because I'm Australian and we don't do the scarf thing but I thought towels... Like... Well, yeah, towels and socks would have been more popular, more sort of universal than scarves.

Forbes: Yeah, the thing...

Dave Jones: Or is that just my limited social outreach?

Speaker ?: Yeah, scarves aren't

Forbes: necessarily universal. I mean, even people... Some people in cold climates don't wear scarves but it's a really easy first thing to do but the machine that I'm getting can do shaping so it'll be able to do the front of a sweater, the back of a sweater, the sleeve of a sweater separately. Okay. And then you would either sew it together yourself or find somebody locally to sew it together for you.

Dave Jones: Hmm.

Forbes: My whole point is to not pay people to do menial labor.

Dave Jones: Right.

Forbes: I don't want... Yeah, I don't want to pay people low wages especially not, you know, somebody overseas low wages to put together clothing. I'm trying to do things a little bit differently. Try to make it as robotic as possible.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's an interesting thing too then. So is the idea that eventually you could get kind of like a distributed network of these things and start to lower local costs and actually... Is that the idea or what?

Forbes: Yeah, yeah. So I'm going to try to open source as much as I can without angering the manufacturer of the machine. So obviously I won't be open sourcing their machine but I'll be open sourcing everything around it. So...

Dave Jones: Right.

Forbes: My engineering tool chain for the front, any other hardware that I add on for tensioning or winding cones of yarn or anything like that.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. I'll tell you what would be cool that just popped into my head. It's the nerd in me. But it'd be awesome if you ordered one of these online, right? Yeah. And then you got an email alert that said your scarf is about to be printed and you could go to the... Send you an email and then you go to the website and you can actually watch it being printed on a webcam.

Forbes: Yeah, I'm hoping to record everybody's scarf being knit and have videos for them. Sweet.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Forbes: Right. Because we all like... I mean, I grew up with Mr. Rogers and I love watching how all the factories work. Yep. I think that's a really cool part of, you know, having the means of production means you can actually let people into the factory and they can see everything.

Dave Jones: Yeah, totally.

Forbes: Yeah. I think it's cool.

Chris Gammell: Plus, it's a little like NASCAR as if the spool goes off and the thread starts... Sorry, the iron starts going everywhere. Ah, right. You have to watch the crash too.

Forbes: Oh, no. I hope that doesn't happen. It won't happen. Hopefully not so often. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So where can people find your stuff?

Forbes: Yeah. So the project I'm doing right now is called Knit Yak, like the animal, like the furry yak. So knit, Y-A-K dot com. And there's a link to the Kickstarter and a link to all the other social media possible. and yeah, that's where people can pledge for the next 14 days. Awesome.

Dave Jones: Mm-hmm.

Forbes: It has to get to $100,000, which is a big ask.

Dave Jones: It's a big goal, yes. It's a big goal. But you said, like the machine costs like 60 grand at least, so...

Forbes: And then the yarn is about 10 grand.

Dave Jones: Whoa. Yeah. How much yarn do you get for that?

Forbes: 344 pounds, I calculated for the break-even amount.

Dave Jones: How many sheep is that?

Forbes: That's a lot of sheep.

Dave Jones: It's pretty much... And are these Australian sheep? Because we make the best wool in the world. We make the finest wool in the world here in Australia.

Forbes: It's...

Dave Jones: If you didn't know.

Forbes: The merino wool comes from New Zealand. I'm sorry. Bloody sheep shag. 85... I think 85% of the world's merino comes from New Zealand.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah, it does.

Forbes: But it will be spun and dyed in the US in one of the last remaining wool mills that still spins. sheep to yarn kind of a setting. And they dye it. Sheep to yarn. Sheep in one end? The sheep don't... I mean, yeah, some people don't realize sheep don't dye when you make yarn from their wool.

Chris Gammell: It's only if you have mutton at the same time, yeah.

Forbes: Correct. All right. Some people are like, oh, the poor sheep. I'm like, no.

Chris Gammell: Really? People don't like that.

Forbes: If you didn't shear them, it would get matted and then they wouldn't be able to walk around and then they would get dyed. Yeah, you're doing a mafibra. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Wow.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, love it. That's awesome.

Forbes: Yeah, very domesticated animals at this point. There's no real wild, wild sheep that you can take for... There's a wild sheep if you don't want

Chris Gammell: to meet it anyways.

Forbes: Not really.

Chris Gammell: So how much, how much, how much you said, I mean, we were talking, you're talking about the tensioners and everything else. I mean, if you had to estimate the hardware that you have to put onto this thing, I mean, what do you think it'll be? Like, is it mostly mechanical or is there a lot of external control or what?

Forbes: Well, the other thing I'm going to have to do is build humidity and basically an HVAC system for the room where it is because it likes high humidity. Otherwise, it drops stitches.

Dave Jones: Really? Wow.

Forbes: That's weird. Where Seattle is kind of a good place for that. I mean, someplace that's humid but not so humid that things are going to rust and, you know, cause mechanical problems.

Dave Jones: Or something. Yeah. Yeah.

Forbes: So, Seattle is actually a really, really good choice for doing textile manufacturing. That's the other reason why I landed here. Wow. Wow. And, but I did build, I built an orchid growing case that has climate control in it.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Forbes: With a beagle bone black and a lot of sensors and ultrasonic mister and fans.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I saw that thing looks amazing.

Forbes: Fans.

Chris Gammell: Like the, the picture looks like a, like it's like a fantasy inside the case kind of thing because it's all foggy and stuff.

Forbes: Yeah. Um, I gave it to, so the other thing I didn't really talk about is I had a whole full hardware lab at home in Germany that I cleared out about a year, a little over a year ago.

Chris Gammell: Oh.

Forbes: So everything's gone, but it's good. No, but wait, before you cry, before you cry tears from my, my oscilloscopes and my soldering irons, um, it's good because now I have a clean slate. So I had all those old projects that I had built or taken apart to rebuild and other things, like all my parts been, everything's gone, which is a good thing. And kind of like reset to like a completely clean slate and thought, you know, and traveled around for almost 11 months and thought really hard about what I really wanted to be doing. And that's what I'm doing. So it's good. It's a little terrifying to get rid of every single piece of hardware. I mean, you're going to, you're going to

Chris Gammell: build it back up, right? I mean, that's the idea. I will definitely build it back up.

Forbes: That's not a problem. Um, my husband also does hardware hacking as well. So,

Chris Gammell: um,

Forbes: my lab was, I had definitely more stuff. I basically had a vintage computer museum at home.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. So, so you've, you've lifted the burden of, of material things. Yes. And, uh, reset to get more material things. Yeah. I got down to,

Forbes: I need to do that. I got down to two suitcases. So when we left Germany, I had two suitcases. That's it. Oh wow.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I've still got my original component cabinets from when I was eight years old. That's sweet. When I was eight years old, like, yeah, like stuff I pulled apart in like the seventies and early eighties. It was like, oh, you know, it's just, no, like, you know, all that, like, cause you have to, you know, back then you actually desolded parts and reused them. Oh yeah. Right. Because they weren't easy to get. So, you know, I've still got those parts sitting in my crusty old drawers. It's like, oh man, I haven't touched them in 30 years.

Forbes: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's sad.

Forbes: I didn't, I didn't throw everything in a dumpster. I had friends come over and, um, people had a lot of fun picking through everything and finding things that they could use and reuse. But the orchidarium was one of those things. So it's a huge glass cabinet with curved glass fronts. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It looks very cool.

Forbes: Uh, and it's really large. So I gave it to a friend who's in Berlin and they took it and, um, it's, they used it as a, like a father daughter project so that they can code on it and give it new functionality and stuff. So, um, very cool. That's really cool. But anyway, so I've built, built climate control stuff. So I'm definitely going to build that into wherever the knitting machine lives. Currently it's looking like it's going to be in a shipping container.

Fabienne Of Knityak: Really?

Forbes: Yeah.

Fabienne Of Knityak: Awesome.

Forbes: So there's a bunch of rooms and collective, uh, so kind of like welders and woodworkers and people who build motorcycles in a building, um, in Soto in Seattle, which is a neighborhood in the south side of Seattle. And they have a new, um, gravel courtyard that has freestanding shipping containers where each person is going to get their own shipping container. Uh, so I'm on the waiting list for that. And they said I could cut holes in the top and the side to do HVAC if I wanted. Um, so that means you can

Chris Gammell: take it on your next adventure. If you go to Costa Rica again or something, or Seattle, throw it on a ship. I don't know if it'll be

Forbes: still mobile at that point because it'll have a really heavy knitting machine in it and it doesn't really like to be shaken or moved or anything.

Dave Jones: I was going to say, you can't knit while you're on the back of the truck, you know, being moved. All right.

Chris Gammell: It's not designed for

Forbes: like space or like,

Chris Gammell: yeah, but, but that's, that's cool though too because you mentioned like if you, if you did end up going modular and then putting them in different spots in the country or in the world, then you'd be able to replicate that kind of thing. So that's actually really, I think that's really interesting choice. You know,

Forbes: so I'd have a replicatable setup. Yeah. So I could, you know, Wow. Set people on their way with a local franchise or whatever. So awesome. Yeah, that would be cool. Um, I mean, a shipping container doesn't have a lot of insulation, which is the only real downside of that. So I'm going to have to insulate it a little bit,

Chris Gammell: but you can knit it as a sweater.

Forbes: I could knit it. Oh,

Dave Jones: that's a great idea. It's kind of like a chicken and egg thing though. I might have to do it. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It would take a while. Well, we should, uh, we should, uh, make sure people once again, what the, so the Kickstarter is called, it's under knit yak. Uh, people should go check it out. The delivery is pre holiday. Is that right or no?

Forbes: No. No. Um, so currently I, I'm kind of under promising and hoping to over deliver and hoping to deliver in January.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Forbes: But right now I'm telling people June of next year that I'll deliver.

Chris Gammell: Oh,

Forbes: um,

Chris Gammell: yep. Reality is better. I think so.

Forbes: Yeah. It might be January, February.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Forbes: But it could be as late as June.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Well, people should buy it for themselves, buy it for their friends. Don't buy it for the holiday. It's very cool.

Dave Jones: Yes. Awesome. Well, where can people follow you on, uh, Twitter and all that sort of jazz? Yeah. Not Facebook. Cause we hate Facebook.

Forbes: Um, yeah. Twitter. I'm FBZ, the three letters.

Dave Jones: Oh, that's, well, I guess it's not common. It doesn't stand for anything. Right. So it was easy to get.

Forbes: Well, yeah, I've been on Twitter for seven years. So.

Dave Jones: Oh, that helps too. Yep. Early bird gets a worm.

Forbes: Yeah. Yep.

Dave Jones: Cool.

Forbes: Sweet. Yeah. So I'm, yeah, I'm FBZ on Twitter. Then there's links to everything. So my personal website is Fabienne.us, which is F-A-B-I-E-N-N-E.us. And.

Chris Gammell: And we will have links to all of the things we discussed here on our, on our page as well. So. We will.

Forbes: Yeah. Thank you very much. Oh, thanks for having me. It's been awesome. Oh, this has been so much fun.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I find this stuff fascinating. I do too. Oh,

Forbes: cool.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Now that you understand it, right? Yeah. Well,

Chris Gammell: now that, now that I know of it, I can go read more about it. So this is good. Yeah. So thank you for the enlightenment. I appreciate it, Fabs.

Dave Jones: Sorry.

Chris Gammell: No, it's good. It's good.

Dave Jones: Awesome. Well, thanks for having me. Thanks. Catch you next time. All right.

Chris Gammell: Bye.

Speaker ?: Okay.

Chris Gammell: If you could start talking, that'd be good.

Forbes: Okay. Yeah. So yeah, my name's Fabs or Fabienne or Fabienne, if you're French, but not many people are. You're not. It's okay. Germans can't, Germans can't deal with my name. Cause there's a masculine version of it, but not a feminine version in German. Right.

Chris Gammell: So what do they say?

Forbes: Oh, they assume I'm a dude and that I spelled my name wrong. Cause I do tech. I mean,

Dave Jones: obviously that's great.

Chris Gammell: Of course. Yeah, of course.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. No, you can't be a female, you know, no, no, not possible.