If you haven’t heard of Theo Jansen and his incredible walking machines, I can’t do them justice with words. Check this out:
His work is accessible from strandbeest.com. I find his creations amazingly cool.
And others do as well, even hamsters (although cats seem less impressed):
But while I’ve found these things fascinating, I didn’t spend a lot of time researching the exact mechanism, nor thought about fabricating my own. And now I don’t need to!
Check out this awesome link to get code to design variants, visualize them, and even OpenSCAD source code go generate actual 3d printed models. That’s just too cool.