After seeing the tentacles curl when I pulled on the wire I was very happy and confident that the servo would be strong enough to do the same. I needed to do the test to see it working, and I had two concerns when setting it up. The first is that I want to keep things easy and use the servo arms included with the servos and I don't know if they will have enough movement to make a significant difference to the tentacles. The second concern is about feeding the wire back into the tentacle. I found this was doable when pushing carefully straight down, but a little awkward. I need to test with a servo to see that it can feed the wire back to make the tentacle uncurl without the wire just bunching up. As described in my last post, I used the "Knob" arduino tutorial http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/Knob This was the easiest thing to set up to have manual control of the servo for testing.

Well, it is definitely a success, but shows I have more work to do. The servo was able to make the tentacle move as I want it to and it was able to curl and uncurl the tentacle as needed. Getting the servo to feed the wire back into the tentacle, however, was a little tricky and you can see my finger helping guide the wire back in. I kept my finger still for the most part, but towards the end of the video when I turned the servo all the way it bunched up, so I will need to work on the design to have some way to help feed the wire back into the crochet tentacle.