Solenoid

Liveloom

A warp-weighted loom, live codeable via solenoids.

lasercut.svg

This creates the shapes required to lasercut a loom from 3mm material. I used baltic birch plywood, MDF would likely do just as well.

Other things needed

• 4mm diameter metal rod
• 25mm diameter wooden rod
• Solenoids - "DC 12V 10mm Push-Pull Actuator Frame Type Electromagnet Solenoid Electric Magnet" - can be found for about £2 each. With this design, I recommend getting either 12 or 16.
• Relays - I used a board with 16 of them. "16-channel Relay Module Board 5v12v".
• Arduino (and 'jumper jerky' wire) to control the relays
• PSU for the relays
• PSU for the solenoids - This needs some power. I used "RS PRO 102W Embedded Switch Mode Power Supply SMPS, 8.5A, 12V dc". (You might need even more amps to power all your relays at once)
• Loom weights, one per thread - I recommend small plastic weighted kumihimo bobbins for this, then you can easily store the warp inside, but you can also use smallish bolts and wrap the warp around..
• Screws to attach the solenoids, I think I needed M2.5 screws for mine.
• wire to connect up the solenoids etc. This needs to be fairly heavy duty, to take the amps!
• diodes to protect everything against kickback from the solenoids. I still need to add these myself!

Rough instructions

My plywood was bendier in one direction - basically if there is a grain have it go horizontal otherwise E1/E2 will bend too much with the weight of the solenoids.

A* and B* are the main legs and supports. D0 slots into the support and is where I screw my relay switch board.

Below you see 'lollypop stick' heddles. Each has a 'mouth', two of the things that look like capital As slot into each 'mouth', creating a nice strike area for the solenoid. Half of the heddles have bends, so the solenoids can be on two axes (doubling the number you can have in a given amount of space).

The circles above the heddles are wooden washers to space the lollypop sticks out so they line up with the solenoids, I woodglue one to each heddle. These are then threaded onto a 4mm metal rod. I add a small metal washer or two to line everything up with the solenoids.

E1 and E2 are what the solenoids are screwed on to.

C* are assembled with wood glue, and then slotted into the front of the legs A4, with E1 and E2 and the 4mm rod slotted in using the provided holes.

Contact alex@slab.org with any questions - I'd be happy offer advice to get you up and running.

WWL.hs

An experimental haskell library for live coding the loom.

Start ghci, and then initialise the library like this (replacing with the path to your arduino's USB connection):

:load WWL

(set, next, undo, again, show) <- startFs "/dev/serial/by-id/usb-Arduino__www.arduino.cc__0043_5573731323135141A191-if00"

Then code a structure like this:

set $ every 2 rev $ twill 1 $ cycle [up,down,down,up]

And run next to send the next line to the loom, again to send it again, or undo to go back.