The Short Circuit movies
had me at “Need more
Input!” I first saw the movies
when I was perhaps six years
old, and in watching them a
passion for all things robotic
was born. When I saw the
Lynxmotion Johnny 5 kit,
something clicked and the
gears in my brain started
turning. I immediately knew I
would not be satisfied with it
in its stock form (I rarely am
when building from a kit) but
it would certainly prove to be
an excellent starting point. I
wanted to take that kit and make it
my own, and also provide myself
with a new type of platform to
grow with. I had experimented with
my share of autonomous PIC bots
using IRPD and sonar on walker
and rover platforms before, but I
wanted something with much more
room to grow. With that, I entered
the realm of PC–based robotics.
The Johnny 5 kit is fairly large,
standing at about 14. 5” tall with an
11”x 10” base. It is similar to the
Lynxmotion Servo Erector Set (SES),
which provides almost limitless
expansion capability. That being
said, a lot of the real estate of the
stock kit is occupied by batteries
and servos. I needed to find a very
small motherboard platform to
46 SERVO 09.2008
work with. A quick search
yielded me an amazing find;
the Pico ITX form factor
motherboard and CPU. Made
by VIA, the EPIA PX1000G is
the world’s smallest, full
featured x86 embedded
board, measuring at 3. 9”
x 2. 8”. It contains a 1 GHz
C7 processor, up to 1 GB of
DDR2 RAM, and comes with
onboard LAN, USB 2.0, video,
sound, IDE, and SATA. What
does all this mean to you? It
means you can install a fully
functioning onboard computer
on your robot, capable of running
Windows or Linux locally. This allows
the capacity to run onboard vision
processing, speech recognition,
voice output, GPS, WiFi, multiple
servo/motor controllers and I/O
boards, and access to any programming language you want to work
with. With PC–based robotics, the
possibilities are endless.
In this series of articles, we will explore my Pico
ITX based Johnny 5 project. We will detail the
work that went into upgrading and expanding
the original kit to make it a more viable research
platform and we will also dive into the concept and
implementation of PC–based robotics. Not only will
we show how easy an onboard PC is to integrate,
but we will explore the many advantages of having
that much horsepower locally on your robot.
While I used the Lynxmotion Johnny 5 kit as a
platform for my project, the principles, concepts,
and even components of this project can be
applied to almost any bot design.
Physical Additions and
Upgrades to the
Johnny 5 Kit
FIGURE 1
In this first article, we will cover
the changes and additions that I made
to reinforce the Johnny 5 kit and add
more flexibility to the design. Keep in
mind this will not be a build article
