“Use an inexpensive Light Dependent Resistor to control servos with a glove interface.
A student at the high school where I teach has designed a laser-cut acrylic hand with movable fingers.
He wants to control the fingers individually. It occured to me that a glove-based controller would be a great way to move the fingers. Move your index finger and it moves the hand’s index finger.
Flex sensors can be expensive. By comparison, a light-dependent-resistor and an LED mounted in a short length of flexible tubing work very well and cost pennies.
The sensor consists of a short length of flexible 1/4” fridge water supply tubing. An LDR is hot-glued into one end and and an LED is inserted in the other end. The tube is covered by a black heat-shrink tubing sleeve to keep ambient light out of the tube.
As the tube is flexed, the amount of light from the LED varies as it hits the LDR and the difference in voltage is read by an analog pin on the Arduino. The voltage is then scaled to drive a servo. Voila!”