Hey this is cool! I am doing something similar myself with the SO101 arm robot from Robot Studio using a patchwork of my own code and LeRobot. Would love to collaborate with you if you are open to it. You can find me on Discord as `.avilay`. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/avilay_lerobot-huggingface-ro...

Would like to know your reasoning on not going with LeRobot.

Looks very cool! I’m not a huge discord user but how about you shoot me an email and we can figure out how to share notes? (I don’t want to post it directly here but it’s easy to find on my personal website, just google my name)

Re why not SO-101: the article has a footnote about this; I actually bought the SO-101 as well! I want to integrate it into the same setup so I can switch depending on task.

Somewhat surprisingly the xarm was actually much faster to arrive; I got it within 2 days of ordering. I don’t have a 3D printer and getting the SO-101 from the vendor I ordered it at took almost 4 weeks. So partially it just came down to what I had access to more quickly.

Second point is reliability: I think the SO-101 is cool but I’d be surprised if it doesn’t break more quickly than the xarm. I wanted something that’s going to last a long time without headaches. And these industrial arms are really mature hardware wise now.

Hope this helps!

I'm very interested in the SO101. I've never done any robotics and that seems a palatable entry level thing to try things out.

How have you found it?

(The author does explain his reasons for not using LeRobot in the post - although "I also use LeRobot for training and running baseline policies, and the vendor SDKs for the hardware.")

[dead]