Ask HN: Best way to learn DIY robotics?

14 points·whiplash451··6 comments

I am a computer science person (programming, OSes). I would like to learn to build my own robots at home (e.g. a small wheeled robot with a camera wandering around). I am missing the knowledge of lower levels (arduino, circuits, motors, etc.)

What would be the best resources to learn this?

Thank you!

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There are kits available with easy to connect motors and sensors, like from mbot.

My question to you is how low level do you wanna go?

Ill drop different links: * https://www.makershed.com/products/make-a-raspberry-pi-contr... * https://www.makershed.com/products/make-an-arduino-controlle...

as inspiration * https://www.youtube.com/@jamesbruton/videos *https://www.youtube.com/@diorama111

Hope this helps! :)

Thank you! This is very useful.

Honestly, just pick up some components (motors, webcams, sensors) from Amazon plus a Raspberry Pi. Google some tutorials on how to interface with those components programmatically.

Beyond that, ROS is the heavily adopted project that can help coordinate all in a robot system: https://www.ros.org/. It's a big project with a big learning curve.

Some newer platforms like Viam aim to simplify all of this: https://www.viam.com/

Thank you!

In the event that you don't purchase any physical parts for making controllable robots, you'll find similarities in programming game physics, which really is just a simulation of the world we live in and how to propell an object around that world.

Definitely. Robotics is 20% hardware, 80% software/control algs, for anything interesting. You can get very far with a virtual environment.

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