it's been a while (but not without updates!)

I did not have much free time to work on this over the last couple of months,

but every once in a while when I did remember (hard not to, I keep the robot hand right in front of the computer), I tried to do something, mostly in the hardware procurement side of things.

some of the things I ended up acquiring:

- Raspberry Pi Zero (also the Raspberry Pi Zero W, which has wifi+bluetooth internally, but I just received it today thanks to Mr. Arjun Rao), for more versatile control (also to make possible to connect to the Leap Motion)

- AA battery power holders, to use AA batteries to power the servos

- A PCA9685 chip, for multiple servo control

- various electronic circuitry (probably won't be necessary for this project anymore)

in addition, I was made aware of a nice project called Cylon.js and its sister project Gobot, which allows users to program microcontrollers using JavaScript and Golang, respectively.

I really wanted to try Gobot and take a dive into the Golang world, but it currently does not have support for the PCA9685, which Cylon.js seems to provide.

with that said, and with a few lines of code, here is the result:

the control of the servos are done through the PCA9685 connected to a Raspberry Pi Zero (no more Arduino), and the servos are powered through the 4-AA batteries.

the next step is to read values from the Leap Motion, which Cylon.js claims to provide.

when that works, we are starting to reach a good place.

Comments

quick recollection on setting things up

If I can swear that the password is correct, then it's possible that I'm getting the ID wrong. Hadn't logged into the web server in a couple of months and was unable to SSH into it. After an hour or so, I ended up deleting the instance and recreating a clean instance (read: erasing everything). I then realized I'd been putting the wrong ID. apt-get install sudo apt-get install Anyways, some links I visited when setting things up (pretty much a dump of whatever I copy-pasted to notes) : Raspberry Pi http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/optimize-the-power-of-your-raspberry-pi-with-raspbian/ Logging http://docs.python.org/2/howto/logging-cookbook.html Tornado - Python webserver that supports Websocket http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2924991/what-popular-webservers-have-support-for-html5-websocket http://lowpowerlab.com/blog/2013/01/17/raspberrypi-websockets-with-python-tornado/ http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11695375/tornado-identify-tra...

warming up

I still don't have all the parts I need to do what I need to do, but I started working with what I had around. I had a 4-digit 7-segment led which I had ordered previously, but for the longest time I had thought I needed additional parts to make it work. It was only today that I realized that that was not the case. Getting some help from this site , I was able to get the digits fired up: This method uses way more wires than this guy (which uses a serial communications protocol called I^2C), but it's good to see it work. I still do want to try the less-wire led setup, as I would like to try playing around with I^2C. In addition, I had recently purchased an Arduino Pro Mini , which contains all the capabilities of the above Arduino Uno but requires pins/connections to be soldered into the board. I had attempted to solder one part of it (the serial/USB connections) a few days ago (note that this was my first attempt ever at soldering), and the USB-to-Serial interface...

chunk update: most parts printed and assembled

currently: stuff that happened are: wired the fingers added screws to necessary assemblies witnessed first failed print during this: servos haven't come yet, but once they do, we can start installing them into the hand/forearm. as always, credit to the Inmoov project.

the quest for robots

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