How I did it: buy a Gen 2 Teddy Ruxpin from eBay, a bench power supply, a soldering kit, and an Arduino, and start tinkering

I'm working on an autonomous rover to deliver homebrew to my neighbors. It's a silly idea, but having that mission has resulted in a wild journey for me. I think it's the key to doing something more interesting than someone else's tutorial.

Here's my build blog: https://crawforc3.github.io/blog/rover

Feel free to reach out if you just want to chat.

If you have a child, you should definitely check out FIRST, started by Dean Kamen, who also invented the Segway. For elementary students, FIRST LEGO League uses simple, LEGO-based robotics. In high school, FIRST Robotics has the students building very impressive robots.

I want to learn robotics too!! I have a feeling that trying to build something helpful for myself, with help from LLMs, could be a good strategy—but I have no idea! Possibly budget-friendly

If it's a hobby, I'd stay away from ROS, as it's a pain in the cloaca to set up and use. Just build stuff, and run it with one script or ten if you need to. Build stuff. Debug. When you need ROS, you'll know it.

Build an army of robots to help you get started with robotics (as a hobbyist).

With my kids we did Le Robot from hugging face over the Christmas break, it was a fun project to put together the kit and get the follower arm to follow the leader. You can also train ML models with it etc https://huggingface.co/docs/lerobot/en/so101

I run the electronics of an art university. My recommendation is to (1) start with the basics, that probably means getting an Arduino (or simulate one using wokwi) and working through some basic examples and play around and customize them. Then (2) pick an ambitious but realistic project that you can work on in stages. Maybe you build a simple robot that can turn and go forward with wheels on a flat surface for example. You can then expand it with more sensor capabilities as you go.

It is very important that you just do it. There is no way of learning to play the guitar without actually playing the guitar.

First: Get a 3d printer, if you don't have one. No quicker way to turn ideas into physical objects for prototyping and iteration.

Second: Pick a project with modest but not trivial goal. Something that exists within the state of the art on at least most axes. e.g. make a quadcopter, make a 3d printer, or make an automated cat food dispenser. The project can be special on an axis, e.g. I want the break the drone speed record, or make the best battle bot for a weight class - but stacking too many novelties into a project compounds the difficulty.

Three: Break down the project into manageable sub tasks, starting simple then working towards integration. E.g. step 1, make a drone motor spin. Step 2, make a drone motor spin at exactly 2503rpm. Step 3, design a housing to fit four drone motors/control board/battery, etc. It's perfectly natural/common/fun to play this by ear, many projects will go back and forth between biting off more than you can chew and isolating model systems for testing.

Four: Integrate the subsystems, test, debug and most importantly repeat.

[0] The Bambu a1 mini is a perfectly competent entry-level product. And Fusion360 is a solid CAD for design side.