AYAB - all yarns are beautiful

We just released version Beta 2 of the AYAB GUI.

This version should fix the firmware upload issues of the Beta 1 version.

More improvements to come in the upcoming versions, feel free to send us feedback!

Last Monday, we were able to release the first Beta version of the AYAB GUI for Linux and Windows. No fancy pattern designer, yet. But one of our main features, the integrated firmware uploader is already inside. And: The software is able to run standalone, no necessity to install a python environment or compile code yourself.

This lowers the effort for people who are not so much into Arduino, avrdude, firmwares, hex files and so on to get started with our hack! Feel free to check out ayab-knitting.com for a download!

To fulfill the requirements for the hackaday contest, the AYAB Teaser video is now also available on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caOzyxEe7wQ

As a response to the overwhelming storm of interest on using AYAB by the knitting machine community and other curious folks, we decided to produce and sell a small batch of pre-soldered and tested AYAB Shields for Arduino. There is not profit for us by selling those shields (in fact, it's a lot of work to solder such a bunch of shields), but we wanted to enable also people which are not into soldering to try our hack with their (newly bought) machine :)

Needless to say, we are very proud to be chosen as a project for the GSoC 2014. Hosted by the organization FOSSASIA, our student Sebastian works on the development of a Python based graphical UI to control AYAB. This will be indeed a milestone in our project, as the currently maintained solution of a commandline control script initially meant to be only a test script ;-)