DigiKey is teaming up with Shawn Hymel for a hands-on, 90-minute workshop on reinforcement learning (RL) and robotics, titled “Train a balance bot with reinforcement learning.” The free virtual session drops Thursday, Aug. 13, 2026, at 10 a.m. CDT, and is built for engineers, makers, and students who want to get their feet wet in modern RL techniques.
What you’ll learn
Reinforcement learning trains agents to make decisions by interacting with an environment and chasing a reward signal, think robots that learn to balance, walk, or recover from a fall entirely in simulation before ever touching real hardware.
In this workshop, Hymel will walk attendees through training a self-balancing robot using RL and then deploying the trained policy on actual hardware. Key takeaways include:
- Importing a 3D model of the M5Stack Bala-C into the MuJoCo physics simulator
- Training a neural network policy with a multi-phase PPO curriculum
- Deploying the trained actor network to an ESP32 microcontroller using Arduino
- Understanding the sim-to-real pipeline—a core skill for applying modern AI to physical robots
Who should attend (and what to have on hand)
If you want to follow along live, DigiKey recommends having either the M5Stack Bala-C Balance Bot or the M5Stack Bala2 Fire Self-Balancing Robot.
Can’t make the live session?
No problem! Register anyway and you’ll get the recording afterward.
Registration is free and open to all: Register Here.
Beyond the webinar: a six-part RL series
Alongside the webinar, DigiKey has debuted the first of a six-part educational YouTube series with Hymel, designed to help engineers, hobbyists, and students get started with robotics and RL.
The full series walks viewers through training a robot using modern RL techniques, from simulation to hardware deployment. By the end, you’ll have a working remote-controlled balance bot that learned its own control policy entirely through trial and error in simulation.
Together, the webinar and video series underscore the company’s push to provide practical, hands-on education for engineers, designers, makers, and students navigating the intersection of AI and robotics.
A complete written tutorial accompanies the videos on DigiKey’s Maker.io site.
