Build with the starter kit

The kit you already cloned

~2 min read

You already installed it. The single pixi install from Quick Start didn't just stand up a recording tool — it cloned the whole SO-101 toolchain onto your machine, and that clone is the project you build in for the rest of the weekend.

What one install gave you

The kit is the so100-hackathon repo you cloned. Everything runs through pixi run <task>. What's in the box:

Robot controls — pixi run calibrate-so100 guides calibration, pixi run teleop-so100 drives the follower from the leader, pixi run check-cameras confirms both cameras stream, pixi run ports shows which of the course's ports are busy.
The newt CLI — bundled into the environment, so pixi run newt login, pixi run newt models, pixi run newt run <tag>, and pixi run newt finetune all work from the repo with nothing else to install.
Recording and training tools — pixi run record-episode, pixi run replay-episode, pixi run query-dataset, pixi run export-lerobot, and pixi run finetune: the path from a recorded episode to a dataset to a fine-tune.
The deploy client — pixi run deploy-policy, the closed-loop runner that reads the arm, calls a model, and drives the follower on what comes back.

It's the project, not a scaffold

The repo isn't a template that generates a project somewhere else — it is the project, already wired for the SO-101 and yours to change. It keeps no version relationship to New Theory after you clone it: edit any file and the result is yours.

Where things live

Three directories carry the work:

src/ — the so100_hackathon package: calibration, camera enumeration, and the take-recording machinery the tools call into.
tools/ — every pixi run task maps to one script under tools/apps/. deploy-policy is tools/apps/deploy_policy.py, finetune is tools/apps/finetune.py, export-lerobot is tools/apps/export_lerobot.py. To change what a command does, this is the file you open.
web/ — the local course site that pixi run learn serves.

The deploy client and its run loop live in tools/apps/deploy_policy.py. The next two chapters call the model this kit is built to drive, then read and rewrite that loop.

Read the deeper reference

→ Starter kits — what a clone-and-own starter is, and the per-embodiment reference for the SO-101.

The next chapter calls the model this kit is built to drive.