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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. 


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