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