Build guides
Step-by-step builds with a live parts list: every selection is rebuilt from current stock, so it never points at a discontinued reference.
Build a quadruped robot for under €500
Twelve servos, a controller, a power stage and a frame. The parts list below is rebuilt from live stock every time this page loads.
A first autonomous rover on a budget
A chassis, motor control, one distance sensor and a brain. Enough to get obstacle avoidance running without touching a soldering iron.
Choosing a vision payload for a drone
Every gram costs flight time. Weigh each candidate before you commit — published weights are patchy, so check the product page and the datasheet.
Build the OOMWOO open-source robot vacuum
OOMWOO is an open-source robot vacuum that maps with a 2D LiDAR under ROS2 and Nav2, with no cloud service. A Compute Module runs the software, an STM32 handles safety, and the round body is 3D printed. The five phases below follow the build order and say, for each part, whether to buy it, print it or have it fabricated. Budget $80 to $150 on top for the fan, the brushes and the wheel modules, which are sold as vacuum spare parts and by none of the shops indexed here.
Build Quiver, the open-source 25 kg drone
Project Quiver is a quadcopter published by Arrow Air under the CERN open hardware licence: 25 kg maximum takeoff weight, three quick-release payload interfaces, four custom boards and an ArduPilot flight stack. Upstream costs the build at $6,590 and breaks it into 22 assembly steps. The five phases below follow that order and say, for each part, whether to buy it, print it or have it fabricated. Half the bill of materials goes to laser cutting, aerospace fasteners and industrial sensors that no shop indexed here resells, so those lines are priced in the text instead.
Build Berkeley Humanoid Lite, the 3D-printed humanoid
Berkeley Humanoid Lite is an open-source humanoid published by the Hybrid Robotics lab: 0.8 m, 16 kg, 22 motorised joints, and one 3D-printed cycloidal gearbox per joint. Upstream costs the build at $4,350, of which four fifths goes into the 22 actuators. The five phases below follow the documentation's own order and say, for each part, whether to buy it, print it or have it printed for you. Bearings and drone motors are ordered by reference from suppliers no shop indexed here replaces, so those lines are priced in the text. The print files sit at the top of this page, measured part by part.
Build an OpenCat quadruped, from the kit to sim2real
OpenCat is the open-source framework Rongzhong Li started in a Wake Forest dorm room in 2016, and it drives two robots: Nybble, an 11 DOF cat, and Bittle, a 9 DOF dog. Ten micro servos, one board that fans out 16 PWM channels, a 1,000 mAh lithium pack, and a frame that snaps together without a drop of glue in under two hours. Upstream sells the construction kit at $319 and the set of ten servos at $119.99, so those lines are priced in the text rather than dressed up as a search. The six phases below follow the manual's own order, and the last one leaves the toy behind: a Raspberry Pi on the serial port, ROS, LiDAR SLAM and a walking policy trained in Isaac Gym.
Build Ego-OSCAR, the 280 g stereo capture head-cap
Ego-OSCAR is an open hardware capture device published by FPV Labs: a stereo camera and an inertial unit on a sports visor, recording 1280 x 720 per eye at 30 FPS with hardware encoding. It exists to collect egocentric data, and the 550 hours the project released with it were recorded on thirteen copies of this build. There are no custom boards and three printed parts. The five phases below follow the upstream build guide's own order. Upstream costs the bill of materials at $210, which rests on two references the shops indexed here do not carry: a $66 global-shutter USB stereo module and a $67 RK3588 board. Sourced from this catalogue those two lines roughly double the build, so the budget shown is the European one and the project's own figures are given step by step.
Build CubeBot, the Raspberry Pi 5 quadruped
CubeBot is an open quadruped published by Vladimir Robotics on Tnkr: a 125 x 105 mm printed cube, twelve MG92B micro servos, three joints per leg, a Raspberry Pi 5 that does the kinematics in Python and a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 that does nothing but hold the servo pulses. There is no ready-made servo board — the project has you build one on perfboard — and no ready-made STEP file either. Upstream costs nothing publicly; sourced from this catalogue the build lands near 450 EUR without the AI HAT and 550 EUR with it. The six phases below follow the upstream assembly order, and the parts list under each is rebuilt from live stock every time this page loads. Read the last phase before ordering: the project ships no firmware for the Pico, which is the one thing standing between a finished robot and a robot that moves.
A ROS 2 robot arm you can actually afford
Six axes, a serial bus, one controller and a power supply sized for stall current. The parts list below is rebuilt from live stock on every visit, so it never points at a discontinued reference.
Choosing a 2D LiDAR for indoor SLAM
Range, scan rate and the blind band under the turret decide whether a map converges or drifts. This guide compares what to look for and lists the parts that go with it.
A line-following robot for the classroom
The cheapest robot that teaches a full control loop. Under a hundred euros, no soldering required, and every part below is picked from current stock.
A mini-sumo robot for competition
Ten centimetres square, 500 grams, and every gram spent on traction. The rules are fixed, so the design space is narrow and the trade-offs are clear.
Adding vision to a Raspberry Pi robot
A camera, enough light, a way to keep the board from throttling, and a realistic view of what runs at what frame rate on this class of hardware.
Sizing stepper motors for a linear axis
Holding torque is the number everyone reads and the one that says the least. This guide walks through the calculation that actually decides whether an axis skips steps.
Working out the power budget of a mobile robot
Run time is decided long before the battery is chosen. This guide goes through the arithmetic, then lists the parts that come out of it.
A brushless drivetrain for a heavy mobile robot
Above ten kilograms, brushed gear motors stop being practical. This guide covers what changes when you move to brushless, including the parts that have no equivalent on a small robot.
Choosing or building a robot gripper
What you are picking up decides the mechanism. This guide sorts the options by the objects they handle and lists the parts for each.
A wireless telemetry link for a robot
Range, bandwidth and latency pull in opposite directions. This guide matches the radio to the job and lists the parts for each option.