Best cheap motor controllers for a DIY joint actuator?

[park44]

@mia_lars I'd frame this differently. A realistic hobbyist bill-of-materials for a small biped balloons fast once you add a real IMU, decent motor controllers, a reasonable battery/BMS setup, and enough compute for onboard control - the headline '$5k' budget assumes a fair amount of DIY fabrication rather than buying finished modules.

[green28]

@park44 I don't think that's quite right, for what it's worth. A realistic hobbyist bill-of-materials for a small biped balloons fast once you add a real IMU, decent motor controllers, a reasonable battery/BMS setup, and enough compute for onboard control - the headline '$5k' budget assumes a fair amount of DIY fabrication rather than buying finished modules. 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.

[camila.jackson0]

From what I've seen: A recurring lesson from hobbyist build logs: thermal management gets ignored until an actuator overheats and damages its own mounting hardware, at which point everyone suddenly starts caring about airflow and duty-cycle limits. Group-buy arrangements for harder-to-source parts (small harmonic drives, precision bearings, custom PCBs) are a common way hobbyist communities work around the fact that specialty components are often only sold in industrial minimum-order quantities. Anyway, good thread - following for more.