The 8-week roadmap
Five stages in eight weeks, plus a sixth with no date to build your own labs with Claude. Each stage starts with a 3D lab and ends with three questions. It assumes you start from zero. An hour a day is enough; if you go slower, stretch the weeks: the order matters more than the speed.
Not sure which stage to start at? Take the placement test.
Weeks 1 and 2
Stage 1. Electronics from scratch
Understand what happens in a simple circuit and why each part is there.
Resources
- Learn Arduino
- Robotics Bench
- Tinkercad Circuits
Weeks 3 and 4
Stage 2. Microcontrollers, Arduino and ESP32
Write code that reads the world and controls an output, first on Arduino and then on ESP32.
Resources
- ESP Labs
- Wokwi
- The Colorfigures gallery
Weeks 5 and 6
Stage 3. Motors, drivers and sensors
Understand how a robot moves and how it knows what is in front of it.
Resources
- Robotics Bench
- Hardware Bench
- SG90 servo
- HC-SR04 sensor
- H-bridge
- PlayStation controller
- Elevator
- Smoke alarm
Week 7
Stage 4. What lies underneath: the processor and the network
Understand what the chip does with your code and what happens when your board connects to the internet.
Resources
- CPU Atlas
- Between a Click and a Page
- Mac mini
Week 8
Stage 5. Complete systems
See how everything so far comes together in a complete machine.
Resources
- Drone Lab
- DJI drone
- Spot
- Atlas
- Robot vacuum with an arm
- Mechanical watch
- Launch Bench
- Visual Learning
No date
Stage 6. Build your own lab with Claude
When something isn’t clear, turn it into a lab yourself.
Resources
- Colorfigures
- Anatomy
- The Colorfigures gallery
What comes after the 8 weeks
Before that, wrap up with the final project: an obstacle-avoiding robot, built and tested in 3D.
This is where the visual part ends. These are the tools robotics teams use; they are free, though they are no longer interactive labs. If you want the long route, @DeRonin_’s 6-month guide continues with ROS 2, simulation, control and robot learning.
Tutoriales de ROS 2 (Jazzy)
Official ROS documentation
The standard for connecting a robot’s parts in software. Start with the beginner tutorials. There is a newer release (Lyrical), but according to @DeRonin_’s guide most courses are still on Jazzy.
Open Tutoriales de ROS 2Gazebo
Gazebo
To simulate complete robots with physics, without hardware. Install the version that goes with your ROS 2: with Jazzy, Gazebo Harmonic.
Open GazeboLeRobot
Hugging Face
To see how robots are trained with AI models. Apache 2.0 license.
Open LeRobot
What you can expect, honestly
When you finish you won’t be a robotics engineer, and a recruiter won’t hire you just for finishing labs in the browser. If you do the practice, you will understand every part before you buy it, and your first physical project will be much less likely to end with something burned.
None of this replaces real soldering: a simulator doesn’t teach you that a cheap wire makes bad contact. Do each stage’s practice, write down what failed and don’t buy anything before finishing stage 3. By then you will know which board you need.