Have any of you guys used Ardunios to animate your puppets? I am looking for servo motors that pivot. Right now all I am seeing are the ones with one motion. By combining them I can make them go up and down and left and right, but not a pivot.

I also have looked into other things besides Arduinos. I cobbled an arm with basic robotics this weekend. (for some reason I can't get the video to post here, but it is in my gallery
http://puppetsandstuff.com/community/index.php?action=gallery&g2_itemId=30586

But, I very new at this so I am looking for pointers. My ultimate goal is to create a doozer type puppet where a small little guy is controlled with a larger controller. An example of this is in this youtube link.

It starts at about 2:30 in.

You could build a custom servo-mechanic, but I would just use two servos (micro servos are small enough).  

The InMoov robot project has excellent resources for puppet animatronics. I made a working puppet hand (scaled down by 50 percent) based on this projects models.


For a doozer like puppet I would use bowden-cables and move the servos outside the puppets body.

Here is a link to the InMoov site that Tioh mentioned. http://www.inmoov.fr/  Some pretty cool stuff. Moves way over my head pretty quickly.  I can understand the mechanics but the circuits and board really leave me baffled.

Oh yes and for those who do not know about bowden cables. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowden_cable  Same thing as brake cable on a bike.  If you use the correct "bowden cable" term for searches though you get better results for the different types available to buy.

awesome! thanks guys!