The Street Beest

Over the last month or so, the folks at Sprout have been putting together a walking machine based off of Theo Jansen’s models.

You can see video of us in last Sunday’s Honk! parade here:

(We all look very serious because this was taken at the beginning of the parade, when we were worried something would break or otherwise go wrong. Later on there was dancing.)

It was a really fun project. I learned a ton - how a crankshaft works, for instance, and how to use a drill press and a chop saw. I think my favorite moment was when I figured out how the geometry of the leg functions, with the fixed triangles and the flexible quadrilaterals (as seen here).

Now we just need to figure out what to do with it!