Robot Octopus Hat

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Just finished the basic building goals of this robot octopus.

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video: Youtube video of robot Octopus in action

The project goals:
3-D print an adaptable servo frame in sketchup
Adapt my ongoing animation code to the creature with chained movement
Auto wiggle servos when no gyro input is there
build a comfortable head frame that doesn't give me a headache after 10 min
find a way to filter the gyro's rotation value acceleration up and then ignore the acceleration down so I get single direction with magnitude signal

The intentionally dropped goals for time sake:
speedy reaction
wire neatening
hide the mega arduino in head
print with black PLA -had temperature trouble apparently I need a slightly higher temp on my extruder, so I went with the natural PLA to keep the productivity up.

It is running off an arduino mega with DFrobot I/o shield. The code is running all the servos simultaneously with some servos shadowing the movement of their neighbor and servos at the root of the tentacle getting information from a gyroscope so when the head piece moves the servos follow. Two tentacles with axles in the vertical plain get the z readings from the gyro, the two top tentacles get the y reading from the gyro. Each swing of the servo from one position to the next follows a sin curve to do soft start/stops. The movement is somewhat randomized to make it more lifelike. Latter I will add a tentacle specific tag to the servos in the code so I can call out specific movement types for the tentacles at large.

My main problem is with the gyroscope taking too much resources from the loop. I am using a L3G4200D PARALAX gyroscope from parallax with the sample code used Microcontroller KickStarts | LEARN.PARALLAX.COM
The code they have works but it seems like a resource hog. I must skip some loop runs between gyro signal reads or else the loop gets bogged down with the process.
I am going to pick up some other IMU's and try them.

#include <Wire.h>

#define CTRL_REG1 0x20
#define CTRL_REG2 0x21
#define CTRL_REG3 0x22
#define CTRL_REG4 0x23

int Addr = 105;                 // I2C address of gyro
int x, y, z;

void setup(){
  Wire.begin();
  Serial.begin(9600);
  writeI2C(CTRL_REG1, 0x1F);    // Turn on all axes, disable power down
  writeI2C(CTRL_REG3, 0x08);    // Enable control ready signal
  writeI2C(CTRL_REG4, 0x80);    // Set scale (500 deg/sec)
  delay(100);                   // Wait to synchronize 
}

void loop(){
  getGyroValues();              // Get new values
  // In following Dividing by 114 reduces noise
  Serial.print("Raw X:");  Serial.print(x / 114);  
  Serial.print(" Raw Y:"); Serial.print(y / 114);
  Serial.print(" Raw Z:"); Serial.println(z / 114);
  delay(500);                   // Short delay between reads
}

void getGyroValues () {
  byte MSB, LSB;

  MSB = readI2C(0x29);
  LSB = readI2C(0x28);
  x = ((MSB << 8) | LSB);

  MSB = readI2C(0x2B);
  LSB = readI2C(0x2A);
  y = ((MSB << 8) | LSB);

  MSB = readI2C(0x2D);
  LSB = readI2C(0x2C);
  z = ((MSB << 8) | LSB);
}

int readI2C (byte regAddr) {
    Wire.beginTransmission(Addr);
    Wire.write(regAddr);                // Register address to read
    Wire.endTransmission();             // Terminate request
    Wire.requestFrom(Addr, 1);          // Read a byte
    while(!Wire.available()) { };       // Wait for receipt
    return(Wire.read());                // Get result
}

void writeI2C (byte regAddr, byte val) {
    Wire.beginTransmission(Addr);
    Wire.write(regAddr);
    Wire.write(val);
    Wire.endTransmission();
}