Emma5: Post-'Spring Break' Post

So Spring Break is over and we're down to the last month and a half of school, and this means time for progress...
The teams are still working hard on accomplishing their goals, and for this reason this post will not have any action shots of Mr McKinley (who is currently at the machine shop working on Emma's chassis). However, we do have some cool action shots of our ECE students drawing schematics on papers and hooking up wires to their prototype boards!
Most progress is happening in the code-world, but the group finally has a PS2 controller that will be controlling Emma!!! (see pic of PS2 controller with rainbow colored wires below.)So far it's still in 'progress-mode', but will be soldered on to a PCB as soon as we are ready for finalization!!!!
Our friends working with power had an itty bitty accident last week. While testing out their power control, a freak accident happened and exploded one of our Macs into FLAMES! If that were true that would be pretty awesome, but I'm just kidding...what actually happened was that the circuit in test was using the USB's 5V from the computer to power up the Arduino, and due to a slight misfortune, a surge current went through the Arduino and into the USB port and crashed the computer... no flames, but maybe next time.
This schematic will guarantee that no other laptop will take the fate of our dear M5_MBPro_04 ... or_07 ... well at least it wasn't a PC (no offense Prof Soules).
Our text-to-speech and video streaming groups are constantly working on getting their subsystems working and building a GUI to make these Emma-features easily accessible. We'll most likely have these systems up and running in a couple of weeks. Likewise, our drive group is still working hard with the SMT transistors and tweaking their Arduino code to make Emma cruise perfectly and elegantly like the lady she is.
Lastly (but not leastly ...) Houston is currently working with the RS-485 network system to get both systems communicating.
Soon, Houston will be able to send and receive commands to Emma as it will be able to "tap into" the RS485 bus. Not only that, but soon enough our PS2 controller will soon be incorporated to this entire shabang too.

In the next couple of sessions, we will definitely start seeing the mechanical aspect of Emma being infused with the digital subsystems.
And soon enough, Emma5 will be alive!