Although he confesses to being a "coding novice, " Langevin taught himself how to use Arduino -- a very cheap and increasingly popular microcontroller -- so that he could get his prosthetic hand to move.
Only a few of these modular components have been designed so far: the AVR-X (an Arduino-compatible microcontroller), FRAM-X (512 byte chunks of stackable Ferroelectric RAM) and ADC-X (an 8-channel analog to digital converter).