Picture this.

You fire up your computer, ready to learn about this shiny new robotics tech you saw in that one YouTube video, LinkedIn post, or what have you. You’re excited at the prospect of learning and using it in your projects. And the cherry on top? It’s even open-sourced!

But here’s the kicker:

You don’t even know where to begin.

The official wiki is a logical solution, but as with most open-source projects, the documentation leaves something to be desired. Undeterred, you flex your internet surfing skills and skim through a bunch of tutorials and help articles, each one regurgitating different aspects of the topic in different ways from the last. Some are just AI-generated SEO traps, while others are so technically esoteric that you give up after the first paragraph. You do manage to find quite a decent course on the matter, but you balk at the steep asking price — you aren’t that desperate to learn, let alone have that much money to fork over!

Regardless, after a long search, you settle on a reasonably clear guide written by another open-source developer. You follow the steps as best as you can, but soon, you start to encounter your first unexplainable bugs. You’re not as tech-savvy as you’d like to be – if you were, you wouldn’t be here, right? Frustration builds, but you keep on trucking, determined to crack this nut. You wade through a graveyard of GitHub Issues, tolerate snarky Stack Overflow answers, and somehow, you get past the initial tutorials. You now have a pinch of an inkling of an understanding about the arcane arts you now wield; great!

Now to do it all over again.

For most of us, this may seem familiar. Having grown up in the era of ROS, OpenCV, and the old guard of now-ubiquitous software, we’ve seen the landscape evolve. We remember the early days of tinkering with Arduino boards, struggling to get our first robot to move, and the thrill of seeing our code come to life. We’ve navigated the complexities of SLAM algorithms, dived into the depths of computer vision, and experimented with machine learning models to make our robots smarter. We’ve spent countless hours putting the final touches on the perfect CAD model, making the traces on our PCBs just right, and trying to relearn whatever math we forgot in high school. We’ve been there.

At Open Horizon, we’re driven by one simple goal: Make. Open. Source. Robotics. Accessible. The method: Leverage the open-source community and the power of the internet, driven by the youth. And what better way to do that than to reach out to the countless colleges around the country producing such bright minds and give them a platform to grow?

So that’s what we did.

By reaching out to students from various educational institutions, we found the spark: the spark of community; of building; of sharing. We tapped into their creativity and enthusiasm and gave them a place just for them. We’re breaking down barriers in STEM, making education accessible to all, and building a community that’s as passionate about open-source as you are. Every one of us is driven by the same core values: build cool stuff; share what you build and learn; and always work for the greater good.

Interested in us?

We’re interested in you.

PS: We don’t do just robotics, by the way 😉 Stay tuned for more in the tech and writing space!