I’ve been watching the open-source project LeRobot for nearly a year now, and I’ve been seriously impressed by the VLA models coming out of it, particularly the Pi0.5.
Learn all about that project at huggingface.co/lerobot
The only reason I hadn’t jumped into a robotics project was to avoid yet another project that distracts me from the projects I should probably be working on.
But it’s Christmas break and Gabi’s older son Santi is coming to visit. He’s been studying mechanical engineering and working at a marine robotics company. Honestly, I don’t think I need a better excuse than that to finally jump into building an SO-101 robot arm.
And they’re cheap.
I’ve already got a Raspberry Pi 5, so all I really needed to buy were the servos, the servo bus, and a power cord, which was about $140 on amazon. I just started 3D printing the main arm.
There’s a “leader” teleoperator arm option that lets you control the follower arm. But since it’s a whole 2nd setup of servos (another $140) and they also say you can teleoperate it with your cell phone, I’m going to try the cell phone version first, as I already have one of those.
So excited to have a robot to do my bidding!