What battery setup are people using for a small DIY biped safely?

[jessica_faro]

@nschmidt I see it a little differently. 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. 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.

[byang]

Not sure I fully agree here. 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. 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.

[lbianchi]

@byang Speaking from personal experience here, 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.

[matthew.yamamoto0]

@lbianchi Respectfully, I think this undersells it a bit. 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.

[lukas.singh1]

@matthew.yamamoto0 This is exactly the kind of context I was looking for. 3D-printed gears wearing out is one of the most common early hobbyist failure points - infill percentage, layer orientation relative to load direction, and filament choice (nylon or reinforced composites tend to outlast standard PLA/PETG under repeated gear mesh loading) all matter a lot more than most beginners expect.

[larrysokolov]

@lukas.singh1 This is exactly the kind of context I was looking for. A first successful unassisted walk, from a standing start on a from-scratch project, commonly takes many months of part-time weekend work even for someone with a solid mechanical and software background - it's a genuinely hard milestone, not a weekend project. Reminds me a bit of the early drone hobbyist scene, honestly. Anyway, good thread - following for more.