Humanoid-universe.com

Respectfully, I think this undersells it a bit. 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.

Genuinely curious - 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.

@joseph_sing This is a great summary, thanks. 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. 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.

@rao91 I can speak to this a bit. 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. Reminds me a bit of the early drone hobbyist scene, honestly.

New to this, so forgive me if this is obvious - 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.

Yeah, this tracks with what I've read as well. 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.