resource · evergreen
What you need
Two arms, two cameras, tape, a Mac, three accounts, and LeRobot, SmolVLA, Strands and Claude.
This is what I used. It is not a shopping list, just what was on my table.
On the table
- An SO-101 arm pair. The follower is the robot. The leader is the second arm that I move by hand; the follower copies it. That is called teleoperation, and it is how the demonstrations are recorded.
- Two USB cameras at 640×480, 30 frames per second: one fixed above the board, one on the wrist.
- A grid made of tape, red X pieces and white ring O pieces, and tape marks for everything that must not move.
- A Mac. It records the demonstrations and later runs the model.
Accounts
- Hugging Face, for the dataset and the model.
- Google Colab with an A100 GPU, for training.
- An Anthropic API key, for Claude in the game.
Software
- LeRobot 0.6.1 on Python 3.12: teleoperation, recording, training and running the model.
- SmolVLA, starting from
lerobot/smolvla_base. - Strands Agents and Strands Robots: the loop Claude runs in, and the bridge from there to the arm.
- Claude (
claude-opus-5-5), to read the board and pick the cell.
The setup commands are in the
README and in
docs/strands.md.