How do you source small quantities of aerospace-grade fasteners affordably?

[karen_kim]

@choi98 Agreed, and I'd add: UC Berkeley's Berkeley Humanoid Lite is a genuinely open-source, roughly $5,000, 3D-printable humanoid - structural parts print on a standard desktop printer (around a 200x200x200mm build volume), with CAD files, parts lists, assembly instructions, and control code all published for hobbyists to replicate.

[pierregreen]

Speaking from personal experience here, Jetson-class boards remain a common choice for onboard compute on hobbyist builds needing real vision or learned-policy inference, while a Raspberry Pi is often adequate for lower-level joint control and telemetry if the heavier compute is offloaded to a base station.

[carol.robinson]

@pierregreen Counterpoint: Building a scoped-down project first - a single leg, an arm, or a torso-only upper body - is a common and sensible way to learn the mechanical and control fundamentals before committing to the cost and complexity of a full bipedal platform. This whole thread is a good reminder how young this field still is.

[rossi30]

@carol.robinson One nitpick - A lot of hobbyists underestimate how much of the real difficulty in a DIY humanoid build is software and tuning rather than mechanical assembly - getting a robot to physically stand up is a much smaller fraction of the total project time than getting it to balance and walk reliably.

[chloe_jack]

+1 to this. Worth adding: Starting in simulation (even a simplified physics sim of just the leg or the target gait) before touching real hardware is one of the more reliable ways to avoid destroying expensive parts while debugging balance and walking control from scratch.

[hill23]

This lines up with my experience. The Berkeley Humanoid Lite stands about 1 meter tall and weighs roughly 16 kg, which is a genuinely reasonable target size for a first serious hobbyist build - big enough to be a real bipedal platform, small enough to not need industrial-scale actuators or a huge budget.

[richard36]

New to this, so forgive me if this is obvious - Starting in simulation (even a simplified physics sim of just the leg or the target gait) before touching real hardware is one of the more reliable ways to avoid destroying expensive parts while debugging balance and walking control from scratch.

[karen_kim]

@richard36 Not to derail, but this reminds me of something adjacent: Building a scoped-down project first - a single leg, an arm, or a torso-only upper body - is a common and sensible way to learn the mechanical and control fundamentals before committing to the cost and complexity of a full bipedal platform.

[sarah.santos3]

Small correction on one detail: Off-the-shelf RC servos are a reasonable starting point for a first small biped because they bundle motor, gearbox, and basic position control in one part, but they generally can't deliver the torque density or backdrivability needed to scale up to a larger, more capable build. This whole thread is a good reminder how young this field still is.

[williams84]

@sarah.santos3 That's the official framing, at least - reality tends to lag a bit. Jetson-class boards remain a common choice for onboard compute on hobbyist builds needing real vision or learned-policy inference, while a Raspberry Pi is often adequate for lower-level joint control and telemetry if the heavier compute is offloaded to a base station. Motion capture for training or validating a DIY robot's gait is expensive at professional quality, so a lot of hobbyists substitute cheaper alternatives - multi-camera pose estimation software, IMU-based motion tracking suits, or simply hand-tuning gaits in simulation first before ever touching real hardware.