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Re: Sharing my BOM for a small biped under $3k - feedback welcome
Posted: Sun Jul 20, 2025 5:35 pm
by jonathan.rao1
@dchen From hands-on experience,
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. 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.
Re: Sharing my BOM for a small biped under $3k - feedback welcome
Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2025 6:21 am
by pierregreen
Slight correction, though the overall point stands:
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.
Re: Sharing my BOM for a small biped under $3k - feedback welcome
Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2025 12:15 am
by ramirez77
Slightly off-topic, but related:
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.
Makes me wonder how this looks in another five years.
Re: Sharing my BOM for a small biped under $3k - feedback welcome
Posted: Fri Aug 01, 2025 11:34 am
by benjaminsanchez
@ramirez77 Side note that might be relevant:
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. 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.