Grasshopper
Jansen Mechanism
After seeing the recent revival of the popular Theo Jansen Mechanism video.
http://www.grasshopper3d.com/video/rhino-grasshopper-kinematic-system
I thought I would finally get around to having a go myself.
The First file uploaded below was a crude attempt to blindly reconstruct the animated gif shown below from http://www.tedngai.net/experiments/jansen-mechanism.html
The second File is a more refined attempt after finding the "magic" Values illustrated below:
These were obtained from:
http://www.instructables.com/community/Theo-jansen-mechanism/
If anyone finds this useful please enjoy!
Danny Boyes
*** U P D A T E D ***
May 12, 2014
Nick Tyrer
haha how random Danny. I just built one of those the other day from a kit. And as soon as i had finished i built that same mechanism in gh from the same instructables page..
May 12, 2014
Marios Tsiliakos
Nice,I just saw this thread.
I wrote a paper with some colleagues on this back in 2009, and re-created the evolutionary solver that Theo Jansen must have used, in Processing. I got slightly different magic numbers, maybe local optimas, maybe I did something wrong.
I 'll try to dig up my files in case I find the report, videos (one of them actually displays the phenotype of the computer program Theo Jansen run) and a thesis that recreated the whole process by an engD candidate in S. Africa.
To find the "magic" numbers is for me the most exciting part of this process, rather thatn the kinetic structure its self.
Jul 3, 2014