I’m very excited to share my first solo robotics project and tell the story of how it was created.

The project is more or less finished by the time I’m writing this, so the logs won’t be real updates, but rather the journey of the creation. I believe it will take me several log posts to tell it completely. Sometimes I probably won’t follow the exact timeline, as memory was never my strong suit. Hopefully reading all of this will be worth your while. English is not my first language, so I’ll be using chat to correct the mistakes I make, but I will try to avoid that AI-generated text you can see in the description of the project.

First let me tell a tiny bit about myself. Originally I’m from Moscow, Russia. I moved to Germany a few years ago, because I was a bit afraid for myself in the context of the situation. Unfortunately that meant that I didn’t finish my studies in computer science, and later it turned out to be close to impossible to re-enroll in Germany. After a while I got hired in a small robotics company, mainly doing software, yet due to the extremely small size of the company I was running into all kinds of tasks. That’s how I learned how to use FreeCAD, solder, and handle hardware to some extent.

Overall, I’ve had the idea of making some kind of robot since I was a kid, yet there were always some reasons to postpone it. That could be lack of knowledge in a topic, lack of time, lack of understanding of how to approach such a project, lack of materials, and so many other reasons. Thanks to the company I got an understanding of what I needed to buy and what I would need to use in terms of hardware. Nevertheless, later it proved to take tons of time figuring out all the details.

About a year ago I finally made up my mind and bought myself a 3D printer, a cheap soldering iron, a Pi, the first pack of servos, a PCA controller, a few batteries, a charger for them, a step-down converter and probably something else that I don’t remember.