Gearfuse

Developed and built by robotics man Drew, this “walking machine” resembles a four-legged spider and walks with an unusual hoppish gait. Designed to entertain, entertain it does.

Costing around $1000 to produce, one of the coolest things about this arachind bot is that it’s controlled with two sets of modified Wii Nunchucks. If you want to test the waters and attempt to make your own walking machine, you’ll need steel plate, copper, aluminum tubing, brass, a 7.4V 1100mAh lithium-polymer battery, a pair of XBee radio modules for communication, Pololu micro SSC board and eight HX12K servos. Check out Flickr for an awesome video of this little guy.

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How would you like wearing a shirt made out of 100% real spider webs? Zheng Xianwen used the ancient method of creating clothing out of cobwebs to create this spider web shawl / shirt.

The shirt took him two days to make using the ancient methods. The good news is that he has plenty of spiders left over to snack on. Hopefully he didn’t leave any stragglers.

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As part of Liverpool’s Capital of Culture celebrations, the French company La Machine created this 50 foot monstrosity and called it art, when in actuality it is a movie prop from Eight Legged Freaks that none of the cast wanted to take home.

The installation cost £1.8million to bring to Liverpool – and all but £250,000 of this was funded by the taxpayer.

Man, if I lived in Liverpool (I’m glad I don’t because I hear they’ve got a spider problem these days), I’d be glad to know my tax dollars are being put to good use creating robot spiders that roam the streets.  The worst part about this entire thing is that, in the name of art, La Machine is turning this into some kind of weird city-wide LARP. That’s live action role play.  After some phony story about this mechanical spider was written, the citizens of Liverpool still approve and want to go along for the ride.

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