I've been wanting to ge into Robotics for some time now. It seems to me that, by far, robotics (or embodied AI) is the most important field in our times, as its an enabler for many other technologies to be developped further. So I decided that in a time just a few years away from AGI/ASI, it's better to focus on something that is important and will have the most impact possible, and above all, something that is fun. 

Ok, so enough of philosophical chat, lets go for the list of materials.

Materials

In order to build the bots I used the open-source project by Jess Moss/Koch (she made a second version for the original project with some improvements), and you can find it here. Its a leader/slave setup where you will be able to operate one of the arms with the other one, enabling you to train it to do tasks. The end goal is this:

Since I'm in EU, the total cost for the parts will be around ~673€, but if you are in the US it should cost around half of this. Other than this, you will also need to print the parts for the robot. You can probably find some place that print them on demand but its probably a nice idea, if you have space and want to build more stuff in the future, to buy a 3d Printer. I recently bought the Elegoo Neptune 4 because it seems to be one of the best for its price range, and it works perfectly for me until now (i've had a CR-10s in the past and its incredible how better the Elegoo Neptune 4 is, they solved a bunch of annoying little problems).

It costs around 280€ on Amazon and you will also need some filament, but its cheap, at around 15€ for the kg. 

So you could say the entire project, in case you dont have anything of the list, costs around 968€ in Europe, or as I said, ~673€ just for the robot. Its not the cheapest ever (as seen in this thread, there are some cheaper options off-the-shelf like this 360€ or this 800$) but it is a cool open-source project that you build from scratch and that you will have control over everything, besides that, there is a community doing stuff with it and the library LeRobot from HuggingFace that allows you to more easily build cool stuff with these robot arms. 

Printing

For the slicing of the project, I used UltiMaker Cura, its free and pretty good, besides, it has a bunch of pre-configurations for most of the existing printers, including mine. I used 0.2mm for the layers and 30% infill, it works pretty nice and the parts are sturdy enough for me. 

I printed the Leader arm first and it was pretty ok, i divided it into 3 prints but i guess i didnt really need to.

But it was good in the end because I had a lot of trouble with this bad guy, it failed 2 times and i ended getting it right in the end by using support, this part alone took 2 hours to print. For the rest of the leader arm, it was pretty ok and printed pretty fast, no problems at all.

And for the Follower arm, since it doesnt seemed to have any hanging part (as the example above), it did it in a single go, and it took around 4.5 hours without problems. 

With all the printed parts, we go to the assembling, but for that I still need to buy and receive all of the electronics and go by some nuts and bolts in the local store near me. I'll leave the rest for the Part 2.