There's a short (3 min) video of how a Jacquard Loom works on the V&A website (V&A = Victoria & Albert Museum, London). There's no sound in the video but it shows, using animation, how patterns are woven into the fabric.<p><a href="http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/videos/j/video-jacquard-weaving/" rel="nofollow">http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/videos/j/video-jacquard-weaving...</a>
I had a chance to visit the Macclesfield Silk Museums[1] a couple of years ago, part of which is the Paradise Mill. Macclesfield was the "end of the silk road", and its silk mills were quite renowned in their day. The mill has rows of large Jacquard Looms that are built into the structure of the building, at least some of which are still operational at demonstration capacities. These were some of the earliest era of Jacquard looms, which accepted massive racked loops of industrial scale punch cards to drive the weaving patterns. The mill includes a look into the tools and processes which started with paper-drafted designs, vetted and turned into punch cards, then woven on the mills. There's a good selection of sample woven works as well, all of which highlight the nigh-photographic level of detail these looms were capable of.<p>On a more modern take, I'll plug the OSLOOM project[2], which aims to create "an open source electromechanical thread-controlled floor loom that will be computer controlled." It's been slowly ticking along for some time now; hopefully it'll eventually achieve its goals of enabling much cheaper access to a modern Jacquard loom.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.silkmacclesfield.org.uk/museums/silk-museums" rel="nofollow">http://www.silkmacclesfield.org.uk/museums/silk-museums</a><p>[2] <a href="http://osloom.org/" rel="nofollow">http://osloom.org/</a>
I taught a raspberry pi intro to computing class last year and was hunting around for some jacquard loom demos for the students when I found something that blew my mind:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78opvFR-VsU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78opvFR-VsU</a><p>These are antique looking jacquard looms in current use in Hanoi. I bet they are still there right now, operating. I know that some crafters use them and there are still specialty mills that make use of modern jacquards, but this is a factory and these look like they are straight out of the 1800s. Amazing.<p>I wonder still how old some of those looms are...
Of course I'm curious why this is on the front page of HN today - but to speed things along, a simulation of the loom using Jacquard floppies (loaded from disk) and patterns : <a href="http://www.arahne.si/how-to-make-a-fabric.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.arahne.si/how-to-make-a-fabric.html</a>
There was a best paper at CHI 2012 about this subject, wish I could find pdf but here's ACM link:
<a href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2208280&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFID=444339793&CFTOKEN=65648187" rel="nofollow">http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2208280&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFI...</a><p>Here's a review by Stuart Reeves:
<a href="http://notesonresearch.tumblr.com/post/26870630666/confusing-computations" rel="nofollow">http://notesonresearch.tumblr.com/post/26870630666/confusing...</a>
Not sure why this is suddenly trending on HN... Perhaps many people have never heard of it.<p>If you're in the UK and want to see a real Jaquard Loom, there's currently one on display at the Science Museum in London.