Gallery & Stories
Reliving the best moments from our hackathon weekend.
Day 1: The Storm and The Spark
Saturday 08:00am: A possible flood alert is issued for Edinburgh. The heavens open, but the spirit of hacking is waterproof.
08:45am: Our first attendees arrive, having filtered through a natural process for how much they wanted to be here! By 09:15, 25 people have braved the storm—more than half the tickets claimed.
09:30am: We gather to watch the kickoff video with Thomas Wolf, explaining the global mission we are about to embark on.
10:00am: The custom workshops begin, starting with the LeRobot Hardware and Software Package.
10:30am - 12:00pm: The tinkering starts. At first hesitant, teams Aqua, White, and Orange slowly but surely get their SO-101 setups teleoperating and begin the journey of data collection. Meanwhile, Team Black faces their first trial by fire—a misconnected USB-C fries their follower board and the laptop's USB port. A tough lesson learned and issues filed on GitHub.
Day 1: Prompts, Pizza, and Progress
12:00pm: Time for the Prompt Engineering workshop. We dive into the tricks of talking to models like SmolVLA, though we soon discover that fine-tuning is where the real magic lies—prompting alone isn't quite enough for these complex models.
13:00pm: A welcome sight—pizza from Papa John's arrives, and the teams dig in, mingling and sharing early ideas.
14:00pm: The Imitation Learning workshop kicks off, and soon the room is buzzing with the sounds of teleoperation, now the new favourite game. Ideas for final submissions begin to solidify.
15:00pm: The final session of the day: a deep dive into Reinforcement Learning and tips for efficient coding with AI assistants.
15:30pm - 17:00pm: More hardware drama! Team Orange's grip motor is fried. They troubleshoot and try to reset the motors, but to no avail. As the day ends, the teams are primed and ready for Day 2, armed with knowledge from robot operation to fine-tuning. Team Aqua, in particular, has a refined data collection pipeline for their color-sorting task. They are rocking and rolling.
Day 2: The Final Push
Sunday Morning: People arrive a little slower, a little more tired, but with spirits undimmed. The real hacking begins.
Antreas pilots his "le-synthesis" idea, using Gemini to generate synthetic data, while also exploring the inverse: having the AI guess the task as a human performs it.
Team Merges & Progress: Team Orange and Team Black merge to become "Orange is the New Black," salvaging a complete LeRobot from their combined parts. Team White works on a fascinating compositional task, while "Team Half Orange" focuses on a sim-based project, leading to the new Gym HIL environment. Team Aqua spins up the GPUs for fine-tuning, but a last-minute Conda environment issue thwarts their efforts. In a frantic final hour, they manage to train a model on a laptop, only to lose the checkpoints when the script ends prematurely—a true hackathon story!
The Final Hour: Team "Bang-for-your-Buck-Data" demos their lesynthesis project and, in a burst of energy, starts a second project, "le-play-and-learn," hoping to contribute more, but runs out of time to submit it.
17:15pm - 18:10pm: A whirlwind of activity. Teams register their official IDs, submit their videos and datasets, and then clean up the room with maximum efficiency. We barely made the submission deadline, let alone the cleanup. What a couple of days.
