I have given presentations about this robot several times over the last few years. From IEEE conferences to USENIX, including a 1st grade class in Milton, Massachusetts. I have mostly been focusing about the "why" and history of the Linux PC Robot (LPCR) and only tangentially touching on the technical details.

The feedback I consistently get is: "That's really cool. How do I build one?" Until now, the honest answer has been "read the source code and figure it out." That is not a satisfying answer, and it is a barrier that keeps the project from being as useful to others as it could be.

What the Design Guide Will Cover

The planned design guide is intended to give someone with moderate technical skill — comfortable with Linux, basic electronics, and hand tools — everything they need to build a working LPCR from scratch. Planned sections include:

  • Chassis construction — materials, dimensions, wheel placement, center of mass considerations.
  • Electronics wiring — parallel port to K8000, K8000 to H-bridge, H-bridge to motors, PS/2 encoder connections.
  • Linux software setup — kernel modules, I²C configuration, required packages.
  • Building and installing the robot software — from source, configuration files, startup scripts.
  • PID tuning — step-by-step procedure for setting gain values on a real robot.
  • Network control setup — running joysender from a remote workstation.

Source Bundle

Alongside the design guide, a curated source bundle will package all the robot software — including the control daemon, joysender, motion script interpreter, and shared libraries — into a single downloadable archive with a build system that actually works on a modern Linux distribution. Currently the source is available at Mohawksoft.Org but requires some knowledge to build and deploy.

Timeline

This is a hobby project, so "coming soon" is relative. The priority right now is completing the message-based control interface rework (see Changing Plumbing on Robot) so the software in the bundle represents a clean, extensible architecture rather than the accumulated hacks of a system that grew organically over years.

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