The StrandMaus Is a Bite-Size Homage to Jansen’s Classic Strandbeest

CNC & Machining Digital Fabrication Robotics Technology
The StrandMaus Is a Bite-Size Homage to Jansen’s Classic Strandbeest
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Photography by Jeremy Cook

After seeing Theo Jansenโ€™s walking Strandbeest creatures a few years ago, I decided to build my own. Jansen had already done all the hard work of figuring out the linkages that power his PVC contraption, so all I had to do was scale it and assemble it with wood instead of PVC and attach a motor … Or so I thought.

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Three years and four โ€˜beest iterations later, I came up with something quite a bit smaller than Jansenโ€™s.

Not only can it walk via remote control and two motors, but it can also observe its environment via a turret-mounted GoPro camera. Because of this, I can drive it in first-person view.

Joachim Haas, whose similar walker was featured in the January 2016 issue of the German edition of Make:, designed a gear train concept that was extremely helpful to building a reliable version.

I call this little one-foot-tall contraption the FPV StrandMaus, or โ€œbeach mouse,โ€ as a small-stature homage to Jansenโ€™s โ€œbeach beast.โ€

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The first two โ€˜beests that I built were closer to the size of a golf cart, but due to various issues with weight, friction, and unsuitable motors, they never walked. The third โ€˜beest (and the first that I would call a โ€˜maus) was even smaller than whatโ€™s pictured here, but didnโ€™t feature bearings or the same gear train setup. Though it walked for a limited time, I soon scaled it up to the successful FPV StrandMaus, which I CNCed out of ยผ” MDF.

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Jeremy is an engineer with 10 years experience at his full-time profession, and has a BSME from Clemson University. Outside of work heโ€™s an avid maker and experimenter, building anything that comes into his mind!

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