What's a good scaled-down (tabletop size) project before going full size?

[young58]

I see it a little differently. 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.

[niklassantos]

One nitpick - 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. Makes me wonder how this looks in another five years.