We never tire of watching Strandbeests with their multitude of legs walking around, and especially enjoy the RC ones. [Jeremy Cook], prolific Strandbeest maker, just made one by motorizing and adding remote control to a small, plastic wind-powered kit.
We’ve seen a Strandbeest kit conversion like this before, such as this DC motor one but it’s always interesting to see how it can be done differently. In [Jeremy’s], he’s gone with two inexpensive $2.00 stepper motors. The RC is done using a keyfob transmitter with a receiver board wired into an Arduino Nano’s analog pins. He tried driving it directly off the LiPo batteries but had issues which he solved by adding a 5-volt regulator. Check out his build and the modified Strandbeest walking around in the video below.
As we said, [Jeremy’s] a prolific Strandbeest maker. We’ve enjoyed showing his larger, clear polycarbonate ClearWalker here before as well as his smaller Strandmaus in which he adapted quadcopter parts for the RC.
Nice project!
Thanks!
Isn’t the point of these things that they’re not self powered?
It probably was when it was first invented but not anymore:
https://hackaday.com/2016/06/30/a-strandbeest-bicycle/
https://hackaday.com/2015/08/26/sphero-riding-strandbeest-is-a-robot-with-an-exoskeleton/
https://hackaday.com/2011/02/07/hamster-powered-strandbeest/
Thanks for the great writeup Steven!
My pleasure. Just keep up the cool projects!
Will do!