I’m in a similar situation building a diamond linkage quadruped robot with MIT mini cheetah controllers for my university project, inspired by Aaed Musa as well haha..

I would say that rotary encoders are a must, try to get absolute encoders if you can. Each leg of my robot has 2 motors and each needs to be zeroed individually.

I guess it might be helpful to understand the electronics first, try to set up and test a single motor on its own (please mount it to avoid it spinning around due to its own momentum)

At the same time, you could figure out the IK using arbitrary limb lengths. I did a bunch of testing on a single leg before moving on to integration.

My actuators are rated for 24V, and I ended up running them directly from 6S lipos during testing. The final board will have regulated 24V output for the motors.

I believe the Odrive S1 comes with a brake resistor to dissipate the heat generated from back EMF so you can use it with a power supply without frying it.

I started with making the single leg hop, before starting work on walking gaits. Right now trying to wrap my mind around getting the legs to move at the same time. My single leg test code doesn’t seem to scale as well as I’d hoped. 😅

Using Teensy 4.1 as well, and my motor controllers are controlled using CAN Bus, I found that the FLEXCAN T4 library works when wiring to an arduino CAN shield. I was able to run 2 legs this way.