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Adventures in communicating with the Brother KH-930e knitting machine!
The kh930e is designed to work with a Tandy PDD1 floppy drive. We don't need it! Make your own cable to communicate between your computer and the machine. You will need:
You will need to make some minor mods to get the cable talking to your knitting machine. Follow the tutorials to get your knitting cable going
FTDI cables have standard 'inverted' TTL (zero is 3-5V and one is 0v) but the KH930E requires the opposite. Luckily its very easy to fix this by reprogramming the software.
You will need a copy of FTDI MProg (windows only) and your FTDI cable. Plug in the FTDI cable into your windows computer and install the driver that matches your computer best
Please read our detailed tutorial on installing the driver here then come back when the driver is installed
Now download FTDI MProg and run the program
Select Scan… from the menu
The message window should say it found a cable
Now select Read and Parse to read in the cable programming
Click the buttons that say to Invert TX and RX
Here is the wierd thing, you have to Save as… the settings so just save it anywhere
Now you can click the Program button (lightening bolt)
The message window will say it programmed
You're done! Quit Mprog
Next we need to rewire the FTDI cable to match the pinout of the knitter. The cable comes with a 1x5 connector, but we need a 2x4 connector
Use tweezers to lift up the black connector tabs
Then gently pull out the wires
Now that you have the cable running, its time to download the software. Visit the Adafruit github repository and click on Download to download the source code.
This code is based on Steve Conklin's knitting machine code which is totally awesome but doesn't support pattern insertion. Still, check out his site for a lot of detailed information.
Download the file and unzip it into a directory that is easy for you to get to. For windows, we're going to stick the folder in My Documents in a folder called brother but if you are comfortable with command lines put it where-ever you'd like!
You will need Python installed to run the code. To see if you have Python installed, open up a command line and type in python. If you're running Windows you probably don't have it, so download it from the official Python site
Open up a command line (windows) or Terminal (mac) or xterm (linux) and cd to the brother directory and then type in ls (or dir if ls doesnt work) to list all the files
Now we need to figure out what the name of the FTDI cable is. This process differs a little for Mac, Linux and Windows people.
Under Mac, in the Terminal window, type in ls /dev/cu.* which should give the following responses or so
The name we are looking for is /dev/cu.usbserial-XXXX where the X's are going to be unique for each cable. Copy and paste the name into a text file so you'll remember it for later.
For Linux/Unix type ls /dev/ttyUSB* into a terminal window, you should see a device file called something like ttyUSB0
If you are using Windows, go to the Device Manager (From the Start Menu, select Settings→Control Panel. Double click on System and select the Hardware tab. Then click on the Device Manager button)
Open up PDDemulate-1.0.py with some text editor (any will do, such as SimpleText, or IDLE or Word) and search for def open(self its about halfway through the file.
Change the line that says def open(self, cport='/dev/ttyUSB0'): so that the part after cport has the right port number. For example:
Save the file