Watch This Motorized Machine Wind Balls of Yarn
Mr Innovative's Arduino Nano yarn ball winder produces beautiful patterns with minimal electronics.
Winding a ball of yarn would seem like an easy, but time-intensive task – ripe for automation. Where things could get slightly complicated, however, is that you would need to make sure the strings placement varies so as not to have it bunch up on the top or bottom. A servo would be the obvious answer here, but Mr Innovative took a different, more mechanical, approach to this problem.
His rig feds the yarn through an arm at a set position, while the ball-in-progress moves angularly as it spins to evenly distribute the yarn. A stepper motor drives the yarn assembly via a timing belt, and the spindle on which the yarn resides is offset at an angle to the main axis of rotation.
This setup causes it to swing back and forth as it rotates, and another timing belt is glued to its base and linked to a 3D-printed gear, causing it to wind as it spins. The result is a device that’s brilliant in its simplicity, and which creates a nice winding pattern that you may have noticed before, perhaps wondering how it was made.
Controls for the machine include a custom PCB, with an Arduino Nano and A4988 stepper driver. Speed is adjusted by a potentiometer, and the winding speed percentage is shown on a 16x2 I2C LCD screen. You can see it shown off nicely – winding quite fast – in the video below, along with an overview of how it was made.
