Description

This site is a web front-end to a program for taking a weaver's tie-up draft and attempting to find a tie-up for producing the same pattern using a loom with fewer treadles (a skeleton tie-up). The original tie-up is assumed to require only one treadle to be depressed at a time; the reduced tie-up may require 2 treadles to be pressed at once.

To use the Treadle Reducer, go straight to

The Treadle Reducer

Other Resources

• A quick picture of what you can do with the Treadle Reducer.
• The output of a typical calculation.
• Limitations of the software and its author.
• A tutorial example.
• Technical discussion of the algorithms used, with links to the source code, which is freely available under the GPL.
• News! There isn't much. Did minor repairs on August 28, 2008; let me know if anything broke.

Comments?

If this site helped you in any way, or if it frustrated you, I'd love to hear from you. I know how to write for mathematicians, not for weavers. Help me make the Treadle Reducer clearer and better.

I'd be very interested to see what tie-ups you tried to reduce, and to hear how it worked. Did Treadle Reducer find a reduction? How long did it take?

If the Treadle Reducer helped you to make something, I would be thrilled to hear from you, or to see a picture.

On anything related to this site, do feel free to write to me.

Now go make something beautiful!

Tim McLarnan,
Tremewan Professor of Mathematics emeritus
Earlham College,
Richmond, IN 47374 USA

Send me mail