The Game Boy Sewing Machine (2020) | Hacker News Reader

The Game Boy Sewing Machine (2020)

fanbyte.com

55 points_Microft15 comments

The in-depth technical article linked from TFA is worth a read[0]. It's amazing to me is that a 20 year-old sewing machine needs to be reverse-engineered and requires other hardware to make it useful. The oldest of my sewing machines is closing in on 100 years old and anyone who understands how a straight-stitch machine works could have it running in 5 minutes.

Does it embroider? No. Hell, it doesn't stitch in reverse, never mind zigzag or sew any fancy stitches (which are all combinations of zigzag and reverse). Nonetheless, it remains a useful machine. For those who aren't aware: fancy stitches can be (and were) implemented purely mechanically for decades, mostly after WWII for consumer machines. My machine is just too old.

I realize that the point of the machine in TFA is to introduce a new group of people to sewing. It seems that doing so by creating something so lacking in long-term maintainability is unfortunate.

[0] https://shonumi.github.io/articles/art22.html

As an industrial automation/controls engineer who just got into a sewing project, let me just echo that old (and new) sewing machines are industrial-technological miracles. And they were built long before servomotors and semiconductors were a thing. Even after watching it work, I'm still incredulous that a combination of castings and camshafts can do 4000 stitches per minute; if you asked me to tie a knot with a strand of thread with my normal modern tools of 6-axis robots and PLCs you'd be looking at a quarter million dollar machine that was two orders of magnitude slower than the Juki I'm used to.

It is unusual for sewing machines that these examples require what they do. But it is also unusual as compared to other technology that your 100-year-old machine is so hyper-optimized, understandable, maintainable, and open that it doesn't require any reverse-engineering or external hardware.

Another point of reference for people unfamiliar with how wildly impressive sewing machines can be: I own a sewing machine that does 21 different styles of stitches. Anything from straight to zigzag to crazy decorative stitches. All that works with the thing unplugged. You can just turn the wheel and it'll do it. When you do plug it in it'll do all those stitches at breakneck speeds and still stop on a dime.

There's few things that upset me the way sewing machines getting computerized upsets me. It's a clear step backwards to me.

Here is also an example of a medical device in which a Game Boy was (ab)used for the user interface:

https://twitter.com/_Jana_Marie/status/910754596422868992

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/9/21/16339122/e...

The Game Boy has also been used as an interface to adjusting parameters in moped ECUs. https://www.apriliaforum.com/forums/showthread.php?351122-Di...

Unrelated. That's a GBA, much powerful than the GBC.

It's fun seeing how the Game Boy was attempted to be used like a smartphone.

Today a lot of appliance use smartphone for user interaction in the same way this sewing machine used the Game Boy.

It makes me think the smartphone revolution was inevitable...

As far as millenials go, it may be many peoples' first experience with a handheld computer. I remember being enraptured by all the silly peripherals for the GBC that turned it into more than a game console, like the camera or the printer. Particularly the camera, which was pretty terrible. It was easy to overlook the low quality of its pixelated monotone pictures simply because it was a digital camera that could fit in your pocket.

The printer almost fit in your pocket.

The camera was threated as a toy and several years later as an art device.

Before the smartphone revolution we had stuff like these, from 1989, the same year Game Boy was released,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Portfolio

An example among quite a few, like the Apple Newton, Palm Pilot, Nokia Communicator, Compaq iPaq, Sony P900, ...

I wish companies still did stuff like this.

It seems when a device gets popular enough, no matter what it is, people will try shoehorning it into anything they can, leading to hilarious results.

Like the gameboy fish radar. Or even the gas sedation add on for kids getting dental work done!!

https://www.destructoid.com/pedisedate-gassing-your-kids-one...

Now everything is an app, a bluetooth speaker, or a selfie stick. End of the era.

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Yes! I remember seeing this at the time and we discussed this at work as we were thinking about a similar controller with a serial cable.

We ended up using the Palm for a few years, it was priced right and easy to develop for, and didn’t take up much space as a separate controller.

https://archive.md/yTfz2

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