Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Integrated Circuit to be Knit


I've been playing with this idea for a long time. The photo shows a circuit board (prob. computer motherboard) and a "pixellation" of a small portion of a circuit board. When I originally started swatching this idea, I intended to knit a diagram for a functional circuit or PCB. The diagram for that got unwieldy- fast. Besides, that, my knowledge of electronics is long unused. Some of it is coming back. Still, I don't know enough to guarantee knitting a circuit board without major mistakes. Instead, I am knitting something that evokes a circuit board. It'll be fun. I can figure out what works in terms of knitting and my patience. Along the way, I have friends (EE's) who design and work with circuit boards. They will offer me major criticism and advice. Once the bugs are worked out, the next project might resemble a working circuit. A major problem is that of scale. Integrated circuits are SMALL. A lot fits into a small area. Knitting expands this like looking through a magnifier. So far, I have a number of graphs to work with after they have been cleaned up. From those first graphs, I hope to develop some kind of repeat pattern that could be extended over a large area of knitting. Integrated circuits don't work like that at all. They are much more specific. I'll deal with that later.......

2 comments:

Kate said...

This is such a cool idea. I'm taking an analog IC design course this semester...can't wait to get back to drawing transistors :)

Anonymous said...

I just found your blog. I am not a knitter, but a quilter and a science & math freak. I like several of your past knitting projects, the periodic table shawl, the binary scarf, the circuit diagrams, barcode, the jellyfish, the molecular hat, and especially the ekg hat. There are a lot of really cool sciencey ideas here. Do you mind if I link back here sometime?

Darla at the Scientific Quilter