Jedi Clankers

The app that controls the Robots
Bracketbots moving together
Even more of them
Robotic arm we used

Inspiration

Before hacking, our team was thinking about what we wanted to achieve from Hack The North. Together, we settled on the following: prioritising our fun, but also building something cool and not boring like a GPT wrapper. When hacking officially started, our team went through a list of wacky ideas, but none seemed to really stick. That was until Brian Machado descended from the heavens (he flew in from SF) and put us in his genjutsu (showing us the world’s cheapest research robots built by his company). At first, we were skeptical, but we realized there was a lot we could do. Like giving them lightsabers.

What it does

Jedi Clankers is a game between two robots controlled by humans who fight each other with lightsabers. Each robot can move their robotic arm in 5 degrees of freedom around the joints, move in all four directions, and also play audio. Humans can train their robots fighting techniques and the robot will apply them in battle. Robots can also follow their humans, talk to humans, and have RGB LED lights to improve fighting performance by 20%.

How we built it

The robot was gifted by the Bracket Bot team, and the external tooling that controls the robot via the human’s phone was written using Python. We created all of the logic to teleoperate the robotic arms, which receives data via UDP from the operator's phone and laptop. We also made generous use of AI tools like Cursor, Windsurf, GPT-5, and Claude.

Challenges we ran into

Working with a product from a company run by a handful of people held us back in some regards due to the lack of thorough documentation, community support, and poor AI agent context. The company is very early on in development which naturally led to some hiccups, but the founders were very helpful with guiding us in the right direction. At one point, a section of the 3d printed robotic arm broke, and we are grateful that Brian and Raghava were able to provide spares and help us replace it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As first-time hardware hackers, our team was proud to have finished the project with medium difficulty despite the lack of community resources (extremely early startup product), and any intuition from building projects in the past. It was a very fun challenge to build with such a awesome robot, and we think that Bracketbot has a bright future ahead of it.

What we learned

Teleoperation and human computer interaction were the big things that we learned, as well as working with inverse kinematics and phone accelerometer/gyro sensors.

What's next for Jedi Clankers

YC.

But actually we hope that with a more stable platform and future versions of the Bracketbot we can create an even more awesome Jedi Clanker. (Maybe even General Grevious with 4 lightsabers)