At my last job I made an app that takes a bitmap as input and returns it converted to a coded pattern that's readable by a knitting machine along with knitting instructions.

The machines I made it for were 25-30 years old and my patterns would end up loaded on floppy disks. I played with some new machines though and tbh was pretty unimpressed with the progress. Nike and Adidas knit like all their shoes so I think the machine manufacturers are just all-in on that.