https://github.com/adamfoneil/loomer
A WinForms virtual weaving app
https://github.com/adamfoneil/loomer
winforms
Last synced: about 2 months ago
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A WinForms virtual weaving app
- Host: GitHub
- URL: https://github.com/adamfoneil/loomer
- Owner: adamfoneil
- Created: 2019-12-07T22:23:19.000Z (over 6 years ago)
- Default Branch: master
- Last Pushed: 2019-12-09T18:27:32.000Z (over 6 years ago)
- Last Synced: 2025-06-17T01:56:59.079Z (about 1 year ago)
- Topics: winforms
- Language: C#
- Homepage:
- Size: 203 KB
- Stars: 1
- Watchers: 1
- Forks: 0
- Open Issues: 2
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Metadata Files:
- Readme: README.md
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README
This is something my dad and I worked on together -- a virtual loom. My dad is into woodworking and other crafts, and he made is own loom years ago -- a big contraption as I remember, about half the width of an upright piano. A long time ago he wrote a program in BASIC to model what a loom does, when given various inputs about the color and configuration of yarn to produce a desired fabric pattern. We were trying to re-create this, as his original program is long gone. He had tried playing around with [SmallBasic](https://smallbasic-publicwebsite.azurewebsites.net), but didn't get very far. I wanted to do it in C# of course as a WinForms app, since that's what I know.
A big challenge here is that I don't understand looms. My dad understands them deeply, but mainly in a *mechanical* way, not *algorithmically.* He kept using weaving jargon like harness and heddle, warp and weft. And I got particularly tripped up on concepts like "raising" and "lowering" harnesses. No matter how many times he tried to explain it by interlocking his fingers, I struggled. I maybe could've tried to learn about looms and weaving to get a hands-on feel for it, but we had only few hours. My dad does have a deep background in SQL and database design in fact, but finding a workable common language on the programmatic or algorithmic behavior of looms was pretty elusive at first. In fact, we'd made an attempt at this very app a year ago in this [repo](https://github.com/adamosoftware/Loom). This didn't work out because I never did understand how a loom works, and I ended up approaching weaving as a [repeating stamp pattern](https://github.com/adamosoftware/Loom/blob/master/Loom/Stamp.cs). But this didn't work as a *weaving model*, which is what my dad was after.
By sheer rapid repetitive effort however, starting from "hello world" outputs, we were able to converge on a workable language. In a few hours we got to the point where he would say something like *that's almost right but it needs X* and I would say *oh okay hang on a sec.... I've pushed some changes now try it*. That is quite satisfying when it works!
The heart of the app is the [SimpleWeaver](https://github.com/adamosoftware/Loomer/blob/master/Loomer/SimpleWeaver.cs) class. Here are few highlights:
- There are a few [public properties](https://github.com/adamosoftware/Loomer/blob/master/Loomer/SimpleWeaver.cs#L16..L23) that set colors and other drawing parameters. [HarnessOrder](https://github.com/adamosoftware/Loomer/blob/master/Loomer/SimpleWeaver.cs#L22) is an interesting property that lets you describe a *pattern of patterns.* This was pretty elusive for a while, but the other properties are more obvious I think. I'll talk about Harnesses below.
- The [Draw](https://github.com/adamosoftware/Loomer/blob/master/Loomer/SimpleWeaver.cs#L27) method is where the real work happens. This is what loops over the X and Y coordinates of the drawing space and drawing the correct color square in the right place.
- A [Harness](https://github.com/adamosoftware/Loomer/blob/master/Loomer/SimpleWeaver.cs#L164), something I struggled hard to understand early on, is what describes a pattern of two colors. ("Warp" and "weft" are the two colors.) Early on, I understood the idea of a [simple pattern](https://github.com/adamosoftware/Loomer/blob/master/Loomer/SimpleWeaver.cs#L220), meaning a color that repeats every X squares up to the fabric width. More critically, we had to implement the idea of a [complex pattern](https://github.com/adamosoftware/Loomer/blob/master/Loomer/SimpleWeaver.cs#L187). This is what the screenshot above shows in use, a string of plus/minus symbols and numbers. This is how we expressed a repeating pattern of arbitrary lengths of on-off segments. So, **+2-3+1-3** means "2 squares on, 3 squares off, 1 square on, 3 squares off." Aside: I'm not really a big TDD fan, but I write tests where I see opportunities, in this case I had simple assertions for [simple](https://github.com/adamosoftware/Loomer/blob/master/Testing/DrawingTests.cs#L12) and [complex](https://github.com/adamosoftware/Loomer/blob/master/Testing/DrawingTests.cs#L19) patterns. This was a good case for tests.
- [Harness groups](https://github.com/adamosoftware/Loomer/blob/master/Loomer/SimpleWeaver.cs#L90) were a difficult concept for me grasp, but it lets you combine and arrange harnesses. Each harness is identified by a letter, for example A, B, and C. You set the [HarnessOrder](https://github.com/adamosoftware/Loomer/blob/master/Loomer/SimpleWeaver.cs#L22) to a string like "AB BC CD" to combine the adjacent harnesses, for example, or use something like "A B B A " to weave them in ascending followed by descending order to produce diagonal patterns that go up then down, for example.
- The [main form](https://github.com/adamosoftware/Loomer/blob/master/Loomer/frmMain.cs) itself is what renders the UI. I try to keep the core program logic out of this, and mainly just handle UI widgets and events here. For example, this is how I [fill](https://github.com/adamosoftware/Loomer/blob/master/Loomer/frmMain.cs#L94) the color comboboxes. This is the [Draw button](https://github.com/adamosoftware/Loomer/blob/master/Loomer/frmMain.cs#L106). This is how the harnesses are [auto-assigned](https://github.com/adamosoftware/Loomer/blob/master/Loomer/frmMain.cs#L139) the next letter. Here are the [save](https://github.com/adamosoftware/Loomer/blob/master/Loomer/frmMain.cs#L144) and [open](https://github.com/adamosoftware/Loomer/blob/master/Loomer/frmMain.cs#L163) features.
## What's next?
One thing that became clear while using this is that it's really hard to design a pattern to a visual spec. You have to work out the plus/minus harness pattern stuff in your head or on graph paper. The next step for this is to offer some kind of interactive pattern creation UI that lets you click the squares directly to draw a pattern.
## About the repo name
"Loom" happens to be close to the title of an [MBV song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bwpoM1k50U), and I'm a huge MBV fan, so there you go. The app name is tentatively **OneilWeave**, but might become **OWeave**.