Say what you will about Lance Armstrong, his “LIVESTRONG” motto and subsequent foundation does some really great things for people with cancer. On that same thread, fans of the Tour de France frequently write messages of inspiration to the riders or other fans to see. Enter the Chalkbot: designed to combine the inspirational messages of the LIVESTRONG foundation with the tradition of leaving messages of hope and support on the road of the Tour de France.










It’s a chalkjet printer, mega-sized and towed by a pick-up truck! Awesome!
That’s pretty fraking cool.
I’m glad this project came to be. Everyone put a lot of faith in one another and we built this in about 6 weeks. If you want to follow our company’s CTO David Evans, he has a tumblr he started just for this trip. He is one of several people traveling with, cleaning, and maintaining the chalkbot. Two companies worked on this, Standard Robot and Deeplocal, both based in Pittsburgh as a project for the creative people at ad agency WK.
francebot.tumblr.com
Nike is really doing some innovative marketing. http://calibergroup.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/nice-chalkbot/