|
> but i know nothing of electrical engineering or robotics. A few words of advice from someone who has been dabbling for a decade or so, but never really managed more than some half baked prototypes and a few kit builds. You need to consider these three trade offs: time, skill, and money. Time: If you have a lot of time, you can learn what you need to learn to build a robot. Learn 3d modeling/printing to make a chassis (my local library has a 3d printer if you don't want to buy one). Learn how to piece together microcontrollers, motor controllers, BMS, and sensors, etc... And learn how to program everything to work together. Skill: If you already are pretty good building things, programming, etc... you can leverage those skills. For a robot chassis, it can be done with things around your house, but you need to have the skills and a bit of creativity to make a good one. If you know the arduino ecosystem pretty well, you can pretty easily put together a prototype board, etc... Money: You can buy a prebuilt chassis, or a board that has integrated motor controllers and BMS, etc... This will save you time and you will probably end up with a nicer end product than what you could build yourself. Of course the more you lean into this, the closer you are getting to a kit build robot. And FWIW, a kit robot is probably going to be cheaper than mixing and matching prebuilt components + some DIY. Also, it kinda depends on what you want to do. Do you just want a little robot that drives around the house (cheap and easy). Or maybe does some line following (also easy). Or do you want a self-balancing robot, or a robot arm (a bit harder and more money). Or something really fancy like a self landing model rocket or a self driving lawn mower (expensive and difficult). You will probably want to start with the easy stuff first, just so you can get a feel for it. And then move up the difficulty ladder from there. But from my experience the time/skill/money trade off goes up fairly exponentially. Getting a half baked prototype for a simple rover is a weekend long project. But doing something really sophisticated or polished is months/years of effort (unless you want to drop some coin to speed things up). It is a fun hobby, but it does require a bit of investment before you start getting impressive results. If you think you and your kid are up for it, then dive right in. But if you think this might be more of a short term curiosity, then a kit or something similar is probably your best bet. |