Preparing for the LeRobot Global Hackathon 2025 meant building a complete SO-ARM100 stack—from 3D-printed parts all the way to learning-enabled manipulation demos. This guide distills what worked for me into a reusable playbook. It leans on the internal project notes in the fullstack-manip repository and should help you bring up your own SO-ARM, extend it to other manipulators, and plan a month-long sprint from research to evaluation.