Well it's been 4 months since my last post; I figure I'll give you guys an update. Both of us are pretty consume with work at the moment. Fred is still working for NASA, and I'm a PC repair tech at a retail store. I recently got back with my first love, astronomy, and I‛TM]m in the process of setting up a pretty mean astrophotography set up. A while back I switch the website host just see how the bandwidth was; if you want to test it out its at holsted.dotnetpark.info/j5group.

-Anthony

Sorry for the inactivity, let see a lot has happen since my last post. For one, I graduated valedictorian, Fred came in a close second. Two, we won project of the quarter with our Robot Arm hooked up to a PLC. Fred is in the process of putting together tutorials on building a mini sumo, since we couldn't really find any on the net. Unfortunately, money been tight for the both of us so we haven't done much but research on some building techniques for our mini sumo. Well that is all for now.

-Anthony

We took our robot arm and showed it off to the teachers and the director of the electronics program. They all liked it very much and there is a good chance we'll win the best project of the quarter. But I wont know before graduation on the 16th of September. Fred and I were both talking about adding a basic stamp to it instead of using a PLC. So we can take it down to the robotics meeting here in Southern California.

Good news we finally got our Robot arm working 100%! We have a new video posted on our site, and yes I know the downstream from the website sucks but its the best we can do.

Saw more fireworks today and lost another relay, but this time we have something to show for it. We decided to get rid of the idea to use switches and are now using timers in the PLC. We made our own IR detector and got that working. We even manage to put everything together and got the arm to close it's hand and then lift the object. Using the IR detector and the PLC it is now in a completely automated setup. But wait that is not all we even posted video of it working on our website so go check it out!