hackathons
Three weekends, three teams, three machines that did not exist on Friday. Each one is a different way of asking the same question: how far can you push a real system in 48 hours. The code for all three is public.
With Team Préhistorique at the AMD Robotics Hackathon 2025, we taught a real SO-101 arm to sort waste into glass, plastic and paper. The bet was data efficiency: learn recognition from large public visual datasets, learn the actual grasping from a tiny local demonstration set, and glue the two together with a LeRobot ACT policy.
The arm identifies a target in a cluttered pile, does a pre-grasp micro-adjustment to fix its pose, grabs, and drops it in the right bin. Fixing the environment let us isolate failures to the visual-to-action mapping rather than blaming randomness. The dataset and model are on HuggingFace.
Echo — a voice tutor that grows a knowledge nebula
code ↗At the Activate Your Voice hackathon, we built Echo: you have a natural spoken conversation with an AI tutor in any of 15+ languages, and every word you use becomes a glowing node in a 3D knowledge graph. Words you practice glow brighter, words you neglect fade, and the tutor quietly drags the faded ones back into the conversation.
The pedagogy follows Krashen's i+1: always one step past your comfort zone, never drilling. Speechmatics powered both the real-time transcription and the neural voice on the way back.
XRPL — payments over NFC and SMS
code ↗An XRP Ledger experiment: a mobile app that moves value through NFC taps and an SMS backend with an on-chain oracle, so a payment can happen without a bank app in the middle. A wallet that never gets blocked, built on XRPL, no middleman and no freezing. Rough, but it settled real transactions on the ledger by the end of the weekend.