update: pivoting into consumer robotics -- this will change everything. i'll be posting my learnings here, so follow to stay updated! i bought some arms and some parts to build my ultimate personal assistant. here's what i've learned so far:

hardware is expensive and china owns it. i spent $4k+ on all the parts, and had to go to several places to find a specific camera or grip -- all chinese based companies. i ended up choosing the mycobot 320pi b/c it has 6 degrees of freedom + 1kg weight. worth it?

the software feels extremely archaic. old UIs. python based scripts to program which joint rotates how much. feels ripe for disruption. tricky though b/c LLMs are perfect and walking me through a lot of this stuff.

where do i see this going? well, i can't compete with china on hardware with the capital i have. like they said, hardware is hard. anything else feels up for grabs: -niche software for specific use -cases of robots -data collection for human-to-robot models, pixel-to-torque models

robot comes in 1-2 weeks. will keep you posted when it arrives.