DIY Walkers from LEGO-scale, to SUV-scale
Although the principles for building walkers are the same at both scales, the benefit of scaling up is how it magnifies issues with designs, providing feedback for fine tuning that is not available at LEGO-scale.
TrotBot
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Welcome to DIYwalkers! I'm Ben Vagle, and I've been building mechanical walkers since I was 11 years old. We started DIYwalkers to share what we've learned, and to collaborate with you. Let's see if we can take walkers to the next level, and more importantly, help to inspire students to learn the skills necessary to design and build these tricky beasts! We started by building Joe Klann's amazingly robust Mechanical Spider, Theo Jansen's majestic Strandbeest and our own TrotBot and Strider in LEGO. Then a team of us from my school attempted to scale up TrotBot in my garage. We'll kick off DIYwalkers with a few posts on mechanical walker basics, as well as building instructions for making highly functional LEGO-scale walkers, based on the same principles used for building large walkers. Good luck building and thanks for your interest! Ben and Wade (Ben's dad) |
Navigating DIYwalkers
Since launching in 2016, DIYwalkers has grown organically as we conducted more experiments and added more builds. Here's an overview to help you with navigating the site.
The guys at the Weather Channel's awesome Rockets Are Cool made this video of some of our walkers - thank you!
Navigating DIYwalkers
Since launching in 2016, DIYwalkers has grown organically as we conducted more experiments and added more builds. Here's an overview to help you with navigating the site.
- Wanna Build This? addresses the question "why build mechanical walkers?" and introduces the four primary mechanisms explored on DIYwalkers.
- Walker ABCs is a high-level overview of how mechanical walkers work, or don't.
- Our Blog posts go into more detail on specific problems/solutions, experiments, and ideas for taking walkers to the next level.
- Build Instructions provides linkage plans and LEGO Technic building instructions for a variety of walkers, as well as some foundational linkage challenges.
- Customize provides interactive simulators to modify walking mechanisms for building in LEGO and other robot building mediums, or for 3D printing.
- Linkage Simulation breaks down how to simulate linkages, and provides sample code in Python and Scratch.
The guys at the Weather Channel's awesome Rockets Are Cool made this video of some of our walkers - thank you!
(click the image to see the video)
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Strider Ver 3
© Ben Vagle, Wade Vagle and DIYwalkers.com, 2016-2021. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s authors and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to DIYwalkers.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Contact: Wade@TeamTrotBot.com