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New Singer Sewing Machine Uses ... Game Boy
Spooticus writes: "I kid you not, your Game Boy can now sew using Singer's IZEK System! Excerpt: The Singer Sewing Company has teamed up with Nintendo to create a new sewing machine system using Game Boy technology that automatically sews stitch patterns, buttonholes and lettering. The system, called Izek, includes a sewing machine, Game Boy, connection wire and special cartridge that contains stitch pattern designs." I don't know what to say. My jaw has hit the floor.
PC driven sewing machines have been around for a long time. Im sure the hardware is the same.
hmm.. talk to the ladies. I recently read an article about people swapping knitting patterns, and producers not being happy about it. Quite a lot like the RIAA...
//rdj
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..why not? Think of some people who do a lot of sewing: Housewives. Or Housepeople or whatever you want to call them to be PC. And these types of people have kids.
Is it so much of a stretch to imagine that a lot of houses out there have a Game Boy? It may be one the most successful portable game console ever.
If you don't need to reinvent the wheel, then don't do it! Sewing machines cost a lot anyway, a cheap old or new Game Boy doesn't add that much cost, and if it does the job, let it do the job.
Singer sold point-of-sale systems that it obtained from purchasing a company called Friden in 1963. The computer branch of Singer was sold in 1976 to ICL. Here's a German page with a listing for an old Singer computer, as well as another listing in English. This article on Computer Weekly describes Singer and NCR as being the kings of the point-of-sale terminal market in the mid-seventies.
Second Law of Blissful Ignorance
As one who bought the 4k$ PFAFF high end hoop machine for my wife, I can tell you these machines are AMAZING works of hardware and mechanics. They're like a very large Rolex. Totally programmable. You can code up patterns in windows and store them on a pcmcia like memory card that plugs into the machine. Then clip up the fabric and watch the thing sew the exact pattern perfectly. I've wanted to digitize a face and translate that into a 4 color pattern then looks photorealistic when embroidered, but haven't had the time. Remember the base color of a piece of thread looks different depending on which way the light hits it and which direction the thread is going across the material. I believe with just a few colors and threads laid down in the right patterns with a precision machine like this, you can get amazing picture quality. Beyond the embroidery function (the hoop portion), is the basic sewing ability which is breathtaking. the thing moves fabric forward and backward with thousandth of an inch precision, can stick intricate patterns, 2 needles at the same time, through thick leather, yada yada. Anyway, I took a weekend and satisfied (almost) my engineer lust with the machine, then gave it to my wife. Haven't touched it since.... :)
Just imagine a Beowulf cluster of sewi... **BLAM!** thud
Mr. Ska
I never did see the user manuals for this mythical machine, but she assured me that it was a real box and was quite well deployed in its day (1970's I think).
anyone ever run into one of these beasts?
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
great, now i'm gonna have to fight with mom for my GameBoy.
... no matter what narrow purpose your embedded system is meant to perform ("This is for playing games", "This is for surfing The 'Net", "This is for IP routing") someone's going to look at your box, and say, "Hey, that's a general purpose computer!" They'll try to install Linux on it, or otherwise use it in ways that you never thought of.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Seriously, if the Sewing Machine uses Game Boy tech, it would be super cool to plug in a Pokemon Yellow cartridge and get a sewing machine in Jigglypuff Hot Pink or Pikachu Electric Yellow pattern/color.
And just provide an LCD for the game, so kids could be rewarded for doing sewing. You know, do an hour of sewing, play Pokemon for an hour. Parental control device (key enabled) to activate same.
I sew you, Pikachu!
[caveat - I own shares of Nintendo NTDOY]
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
I, for one, refuse to provide any kind of physical armament to my video games. It's bad enough when your spaceship gets hit by an asteroid on screen. Now your computer can give you realistic puncture wounds to simulate micrometeroid damage.
And I still fear the ferocious Furby...
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Computer controlled sewing machines are extremely expensive. The one-of-a-kind hardware is a pain in the butt, and big bucks all around.
I'd bet they wanted to plug it into a windows95 pc at first, (usb or serial) until they thought about unlicensed software sharing. From there it was a short step to a cheap, proprietary hardware only solution.
I doubt if there's enough interest to reverse engineer this to hack it to a PC, but you never know.
Even if reverse-engineering happened, though, I'm sure singer would still be happy to sell the sewing machines.
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That rumor was never confirmed, but it seemed plausible that the expansion port was meant for _something_. If so, maybe it was a Singer sewing machine, and maybe it was the start of the relationship which brings us this Izex thing.
11*43+456^2
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The system, called Izek, includes a sewing machine, Game Boy, connection wire and special cartridge that contains stitch pattern designs.
What's next? The Vic-20 powered washing machine?
Oops. Too late; I already did that when the washing machine blew its timer. Now, a bank of relays and a machine language program in ROM controls all the washing machine's functions.
For Singer, this is a great idea: integrate technology into their products, and using mostly off-the-shelf items.
Can it embroider game screens into T-shirts, though? Immortalize that high score into cotton? That's the *real* question.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Using AutoCAD to design stitching patterns and using a DXF2IZEK utility to port them to your Singer.
Then stitch pattern trading goes on to the 'Net. From then the obvious problem of 0-day St1tchz and p@tt3rns copyright violations surface....
"Hey D00dz! I g0t this k-rad T0mmy H1lf1g3r st1tch, l00king fer L@c0ste cr0c0dil3 or G@P l0g0 for tr@dez! L3v1s lamerz need n0t @pply."
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Vote Inanimate Carbon Rod in 2000
I have the PDA cart you speak of, it does have a learning IR remote. Try the GameBoy Dev'rs site for more stuff. There's a MIDI cart, an MP3 player cart and someone even managed to get a robot running using a GameBoy and Lego...
Do you get points in Robot Wars if you use your opponent's components to make your own robot bigger? Maybe there are points for "assimilation".
What's the big deal here? We take an 750mz P3 with 512MB of ram and a graphics card that would have singlehandedly doubled NASA's computing capability back in the Apollo era, and we use that as a glorified gameboy! (I'm going to go play Half Life when I'm done writing this).
Face it -- The Game boy is a computer. Just because it's normally used to play cute games doesn't mean that it's not able to do anything else. Where's your hacker ethic? The 4Mz Z80-lookalike that runs it was one of the mainstays of hobby computing until the IBM PC overran the competition (remember CPM or the TRS-80? And with up to 2MB of ROM, it's got the program storage of a small hard disk of the era. (4K of RAM is a bit small, but quite livable -- equivalent to a VIC-20.).
With an external floppy (ooh! 1M of storage, I'd be in HEAVEN!) or some flash RAM, and a 1200 baud modem (no K there!), it'd make a quite respectable early-80s BBS. Your average home hobbyist would have been scandalized about using that MUCH processing power (mostly because of the hundreds of K of available storage) 'just' to run a sewing machine.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
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You never can tell. I have a sewing machine. Of course, it's a completely analog type that wouldn't work with this. However, I've been thinking the I need to write a Linux program to convert GIF files into cross-stitch patterns.
And along those lines, especially in the area of cross-stitch patterns (which for those that don't know usually consist of a grid filled with symbols to denote colors), there are widespread piracy/IP issues causing havoc in the crafts industry. The pattern makers are screaming because the advances in the internet, home scanning, etc have made it much easier to share pirated patterns which were formerly limited to xeroxing from a friend's book (and obviously lost quality after the first generation).
I do not have a signature
Heh. I wonder what they'll be able to do with the GameBoy Advance that's due out soon. Already, just with the basic GameBoy and GameBoy Color, they've released a camera, a printer, etc.
Interact, the company that makes the ever-popular Gameshark cheating system created a device that lets you send and receive email through your GameBoy much like a Pocketmail device. Looks like all of those jokes about PalmOS devices looking like GameBoys can be applied the other way around as well.
Imagine throwing this thing on the network.
Solarwinds SNMPSweep:
IP Response Time System Name Machine Type Description
192.168.1.1 20ms Data Center Ancillary Synoptics BayStack 350F HW:RevA FW:V1.01 SW:V1.2.0.10
192.168.1.2 0ms DCServerBDC Windows NT Hardware: x86 Family 6 Model 7 Stepping 3 AT/AT Compatible
192.168.1.3 0ms Threadmeister1 Singer/Nintendo 150 stitch pattern Game Boy
THAT'D raise some eyebrows!
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
No, that would be using Nintendo to fight Sony.
As some other posters have pointed out down below in the +1 area, current high-end sewing machines tend to be highly computerized and highly expensive. They're like special-purpose milling machines. They tend to use docking cables to laptops to handle the importation of sewing patterns, stitching patterns, whatever.
The obvious problem with this is that laptops are WAY expensive, and, let's face it, the overlap between the sewing machine crowd and the laptop crowd is not 100%.
The non-obvious problem is that sewing and stitching patterns are copyrighted, and the software on the laptops likewise. This led to some ferocious encryption stuff. The protocols spoken by the machines were highly proprietary and had to be run through printer-port dongles. It was fierce...and inconvenient.
The GameBoy solution solves so many things, it just has to be elegant. The cartridge amounts to a dongle. The GameBoy provides all the computing smarts needed - a laptop was extreme overkill in this department. Also, you get to cut down on the solid state stuff in the sewing machine itself, and take advantage of the immense economies of scale of the Gameboy, which has got to be the most immediate benefit here.
At the camp I work at, every year, a group of Quilters come in to quilt for a weekend using our facilities. They come in and quilt till 1 or two in the morning....they are insane quilters...and their sewing machines are simply incredible! Several of the quilters have high-end sewing machines with LCD, backlit displays and accept 3.5" floppy disks to program in stitches and such. This gameboy cartridge thing doesn't seem nearly as portable and as useful as a simple floppy! These women were incredible..they would go home and program stitches and download the latest stuff off the net so they could stitch some stronger seams and such. And that was more than a year ago....
The anti-salmon
Sewing machines are just the start. Soon we'll see Game Boy interfaces to sheet metal cutters, lathes, drop forges and welding robots.
About 3 years ago, I designed a Gameboy cartridge which interfaced with the Benshaw RSD series of soft starters (I'm the lead designer) and worked with the unit to provide preventative maintenance and other goodies. The director of engineering said it was a toy and nobody'd use it.
Now I'm working on the Palm version and people have been demanding it for the last eight months. I'm going to email the link to this guy and see what he says now. :-)
You: Yeah, it's been acting up a bit, I'm wondering if maybe you could take a look at it...
Sewing Machine Repair Guy: Okay, well, let me see if I can--*CRUNCH* AAGH! MY HAND!! IT BIT MY HAND!! I'M BLEEDING!
Demon Sewing Machine: *growl* I WILL SWALLOW YOUR SOUL *snarl*
You: *gales of laughter at SMRG's expense*
Okay, maybe I've just been programming in JavaScript too much today, but there are endless possibilities for a demon-possessed sewing machine!
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
this was announced months ago, but i dunno when if the release date is/was accurate. game boys are also used as medical pdas and some other stuff as well
must not, ARGGGGGGGGGGHHHH!!
can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these? if beowulf clusters run linux and gbc is just an overclocked modified z80, technically i'm sure it's possible...
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Peace,
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[o]_O
My Mom will buy me that Game Boy.
:-)
Sewing machines are pretty darn sophisticated these days. A typical automated embroidery system (about the same size as a regular ol' sewing machine) have color LCD touch-screens, a considerable amount of internal RAM, and use floppy drives or flash-cards to transfer data. They're pretty impressive. If Nintendo wants to try and make a mark in this area I wish them luck. -Bryan
...are downloadable blueprints for those DeCSS T-shirts! ;-)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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A neat, if decidedly weird, idea; just be careful you don't mix up your game packs.
I'd hate to accidentally stick Castlevania in there, and suddenly have my sewing machine possessed by a demon...
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I was at an electronics store the other day, and I saw a magazine (Elektor, Oct 2000) with an article about a new use for a gameboy. Basically, you plug in this cartridge, and connect cables to it, and you gameboy becomes a hand-held oscilloscope! I found a website about it, which also has a ROM image available for download if you want to try it out on an emulator! Pretty cool if you ask me...
-MSD.dyndns.org
"Sucks to your ass-mar"
Well, we've just gone full circle now, haven't we?
Starting with the punch cards inspired by the textile industry, and using the icons inspired by embroidery... Now we're using a pocket gaming system to do the original functions we copied!
I guess that's a tribute to our history, albeit a sick one.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
A few years back I was writing software to control tufting machines (like big sewing machines for making carpet). I almost used the GameBoy as the platform because it took almost zero processing power (the GameBoy has an 8Mhz Z80 clone - which is quite reasonable) and needed only about 64K to run, including the code and buffers to display a graphic of the patter. The GameBoy can actually address about 16MB of memory via page-flipping.
The real benefit of the GameBoy is if you try to price an industrial control with a few buttons and a nice LCD, you quickly exceed the $50 in small quantities that a GameBoy at Toys'R'Us costs.
Nobody else believes me, but I once took my bike wheel to a bike shop to have them calibrate it (ie, bang it back into shape). In order to make sure the wheel was perfectly "true", they hooked it up to some sort of electronic measuring device.
There were a couple of wires leading from the device into a Nintendo catridge, which was plugged into a NES that was displaying some sort of digital readout on the TV screen.
Cool, huh? I like this Singer/GameBoy story, since maybe now people will believe my bike calibration/NES story.
If I ever see a Sega Master System in my proctologist's office, I'm leaving.
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Wasn't this posted here months ago? I know that I read about it a while ago, where a cartridge could take kids pokemon and stitch them out. Perhaps I read it somewhere else. Cool anyhow.
Eh...