Poor Bernie has been sitting there on the coffee table unable to move for a while now. He has developed a bit of a lean because his poor tummy is carrying all of his weight, He can't even wave when people come to visit him. Clearly this must be fixed, and as many a quadruped knows, limbs are handy things to have around.
I've been thinking about how to do this for a while now, because I want to use just one servo motor to control the whole limb. This will reduce the load on the arduino, simplify the programming and make the leg lighter, but makes the mechanism more complicated to design. I started by playing with some cardboard, and then went back to the drawing board to see how I could make this idea work. Like all of this project, there is a lot of documentation which will probably never see the light of day, but it sure does help fill a boring lecture and makes construction much easier and quicker.
Before anyone asks, these legs are not in any way load rated! They will not be carrying the weight of the dragon, just providing some balance and making him look less like a glorified snake.