Anyone know any forums like this but for getting help with making robots?
Not specifically, but thereās probably a healthy robot community around the Arduino spaces.
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Do you think making robots is an even more niche activity than making games then? I suppose it costs more so thereās more of a barrier to entry. Itās much cheaper to make a virtual robot in Unity I guess. I would like to learn animatronics.
The Arduino forum looks promising.
Reddit would be one of my first choices to look. Better yet they might direct you to a good forum too.
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It may well help you to define what type of robots you are interested in. I can probably point you to some industrial robot places, but I get the idea thatās not what you want.
So just google around.
Iād say hobbyist robotics is definitely a lot more niche than hobbyist game dev. Since you work with very slow processors, small RAM etc and real electronics a lot more knowledge is needed to get something even remotely useful working; plus, itās not free 
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Actually, its quite easy to buy a servo-controller board, and a few servos and stick them together. And thereās usually a few sample programs written in C to get you started. Last thing I made was a robot dog. Itās legs were made from pencils. It couldnāt really walk very well or carry its own power supply. But that was 10 years or so ago and hopefully batteries have improved now.
Now thereās the raspberry Pi and stuff so it that has lots of RAM to use for advanced things like face detection. I think you can also run Unity games on it(?)
My plan is to make humanoid robots or animatronic muppets and do a vlog about it. Iām inspired by David from Prometheus. Obviously youāve got to make the first one ātoo humanā. (Which they stole from Star Trek and Dataās brother Lore!)
Game development hasnāt been niche for many years. For robotics check out make magazine for a starting point:
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Just make stuff! Here in Australia I just head down to jaycar and grab some (>expensive imported and rebranded<) components and put them together. Jaycar also have some good books for getting started. The arduino forums are sometimes good.
But I think the best resource is just googling around. For motor controllers and things like that, there are tons of circuits all over the internet.
For vision stuff, opencv is pretty useful as well, but it can be a bit heavy going at the beginning.
The biggest problem Iāve had with small scale robotics is I/O count. Sensibly using your available I/O becomes much more significant then memory or processing power. At least with industrial robots.
I donāt think Iāve ever run out of memory or processing power.
Iāve done electronics and robotics myself, I didnāt mean to say itās unreasonable to get onto as a hobby, not at all, it just definitely requires more starting understanding than opening up unity and dropping an FPS controller in
Good point. Shift registers can be a bit fiddly and wonāt always be appropriate but could artificially magnify your I/O count in some cases if you havenāt tried them.
Not unless youāre doing realtime image processing 
But yeah, sensors and actuators can add up fast.
Thatās true. My robots donāt do anything like that. Its more along the lines of āMove this box which has been carefully positioned at the starting point to a well defined position on the palletā.
When we have to do hard data crunching we tend to send it off to a regular computer.
Especially for me when I canāt generally trust the output of a single sensor, or that a single actuator will actually work on demand. So I guess in reality you can half the number of I/O I use if you arenāt giving your robot supervisory control over what amounts to a toxic bomb.
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Can we get the WIP forum split into one for games and one for assets while youāre at it?
Would that I had such power my friend. I am but a humble roboticist.
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Youāve had how many decades of science fiction to figure out how to make a killer robot to get things done for you? This sounds like a you problem.
Youād think that, but every time we try and make a robot engage with the forums or the comment section of the blog posts it just turns itself off immediately. Really weird bug.
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