Parks x Needle is an homage to some of my favorite things - yarn, parks, and robots. This project was done in collaboration with Owen Trueblood as part of the Ground Truth IRL exhibition hosted by the Data Through Design (DxD) collective.

There were four major steps in producing these textile park visualizations:

1. Hacking the tufting gun so that it can be controlled programmatically

2. Generating tool paths for the tufting gun to tuft the shape of a park from each borough in

   New York City

3. Controlling a UR5 robot arm and tufting gun to stitch the shapes of the wildlife zones

4. Park inspired punch-needling done by hand to fill in the boundaries tufted by the robot

Hacking the Tufting Gun

Tufting is a textile manufacturing process where a needle shoves yarn into fabric and the fabric’s backing holds the yarn in place. It can be done by hand with a special large hollow needle called the punch needle or a machine called a tufting gun.

We first prototyped by mounting a punch needle on the UR5 robot arm, but decided to work with a tufting gun instead for speed. We wanted a way to control the tufting gun either from the robot controller or a computer. To do so, Owen replaced the motor controller, added an Arduino, exposed the Arduino’s USB connection, and added a standard stereo 3.5mm audio jack for the IO port. The USB was used to update the firmware, the digital output was used by the robot to turn the tufting gun on or off, and the analog output was used to set the speed of the tufting gun.

Generating Tool Paths

For the final pieces, I wanted the robot to draw the shapes of the parks which later I filled in with colors I saw from the parks. To do so, we used the NYC Parks Forever Wild dataset from Open Data NY which maps the ecologically important wildlife zones across 138 parks in NYC. For parsing the data and generating the tool path, I used a software called Houdini. I felt comfortable with Houdini because I’ve worked in the animation industry for the past five years where it is heavily used for creating procedural models, crowd simulations, and special effects.

Houdini provides a node-based programming environment for manipulating geometry and its off-the-shelf nodes allow for common operations like moving geometry around, simulating particles, adding noise, etc. But there are also nodes that allow arbitrary programs to be written to create any kind of operation that you might want. By combining some common geometry nodes and custom scripts, I made a Houdini node network did the following:

1. Create a canvas polygon out of horizontal rows to represent the 16’ x 20’ monk cloth to be tufted on.
2. Create Houdini polygon primitives from the NYC Parks Forever Wild GeoJSON data using vvzen’s Houdini-Geospatial-Tools.
3. Transform the park shape primitive to fit in the canvas.
4. Extrude the park shape to find intersections with the canvas polygon.