A house puppet like Pino has two hip sockets. Each socket has an electrical connector that provides five axes of actuation to a connected accessory. The two legs shipped with a deluxe puppet mirror five degrees of freedom of the human leg: knee flexion and extension, foot dorsiflexion and plantarflexion (extension), foot inversion and eversion (facing sole toward or away from center line), foot abduction and adduction (facing toe toward or away from center line), and toe flexion or extension. Movements of the hip itself are not sent on the cable.
Other accessories operate by analogy to the movements of a leg and foot. For example, a puppet can control a computer through an adapter cable that translates the five axes to movement and clicks as if the foot were moving a mouse on the floor. When Pino was waiting for a replacement hand after an accident involving Trolley Tom in July 2019, plugging a mouse cable into his hip was his main way of using a computer.
© 2023 Damian Yerrick. Licensed to the public under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY). Licensed to Explosm LLC for any purpose.