This post is to clarify some doubts about what are “changes” with the new "HP Otto starter kit" and clear transparency of how things have been run in the last 8 years. If you don't know anything about Otto DIY, please read how the project started in this post.

Otto DIY created a boom and disruption in robotics at the beginning of 2016; the idea that anyone, from anywhere, can download files into their 3D printers to make the enclosure parts and just locally source simple standard electronic parts needed to build their own small robot (for fun or as a hobby). That was very innovative at that time and it was all leveraged as an open source project.

It happily began with a very positive response, unfortunately an almost immediate kickstarter scam by Acrobotic that promised to share a small % of the profits, disappointed me, they unfortunately they barely delivered to backers and I did not see a single penny from that. Other people were making money out of the project but not me to at least pay for materials? That pushed me to move on as an ecommerce business of kits with all the challenges to tackle. I started part-time and stayed mainly focused on community, creativity and designing new robots every year in an open manner.

Remixes from the community were nice, an overflow of creativity! but many copycats only for profit started to pop up in the form of "cheap low end kits" and it was fine as it was open source, but all these very bad quality robots with missing parts, created bad reputation in "Otto DIY" as a brand, open source doesn't mean you can use the copyright brand, name and logo but many did without my consent.

There is a big misunderstanding in open source = all free and the common thinking is “I can also copy your brand, I don't need to worry about copyrights and I can even request you to help me to replicate your product, all the way with support for my clients and free promotion, because is all open” quite unreasonable statement in my opinion but many people think like that.

2017 was the highest hype time of the Otto community, very active, imaginative and helpful, especially for me as a designer without coding or electronic skills yet, it was a great source of learning and feedback. I was also a beginner in many aspects!

Open source abuse

In a positive side open source helps greatly to spread the word without major investment in marketing but it creates trouble in the long run; if the remixes community members create are not well documented or someone had a bad experience that you can't really control on the parts they outsourced on their own, at the end of the day they will blame it on “Otto DIY” as brand, very unfairly because they were using non-official kits. When I gave up control to a certain extent in good faith, this was mercilessly exploited, quality standards were lowered to sell low cost kits fast, support was passed on to me, so more responsibility but less income for the project. It created a cheap notion that did not allow it to scale.

The contribution loop was broken, is what the software community calls them “freeloaders”, a community without relevant contributions leaves a project to slowly dry.

Nevertheless 2019 was the year I took the leap of leaving a full time stable job to give it all to the project and a fulltime passion. I did this by establishing a startup in Europe right before pandemic.

We got great help from a EU grant that sustained our first employee salary, accounting, legal and other expenses for couple years but we faced constant stock issues, logistics, accountancy or supply challenges popping out every day, as we had mainly a drop-shipping business there were many delays and import duties for our buyers to deal with. We improved that for Europe customers by having our own farm and supplier in Spain but that alone took all our energy and efforts.

As a new company you have to bootstrap always and being open source it is not a fair game in the robotics or Edtech world. Pretty much every other company plays the highly protected way when developing a solution and many people or companies said they are open but when you check they have an empty documentation so basically they are taking advantage of the term to step on top.

We had struggles with quality and hardware, stable supply and consistency, especially with the motors. Just the documentation was time-consuming maintenance of designs, fixing others' contributions, manuals etc but after lots of work we managed to consolidate. Read more here: How to properly document your open source project?

Constant iteration was great thanks to 3D printing but also created confusion in the community of what files to use, what video to follow? Even with proper naming and cleaning of files that were no longer relevant, there were many platforms where Otto was shared to gain more exposure, keeping them ALL updated was a full time job, at the end people already have copies somewhere else in their websites still linked to old videos, even with the multiple warnings we put, people just don't read 😀and is extra unnecessary work to handle.

There's nothing more expensive than cheap things

We tried so many multiple ways of sustaining the project with a variety of business strategies to provide educational value to schools, the right target to sell to. Otto Academy, selling 3D files, Otto inventor program, Otto Leaders, Otto Clubs, Otto at Home, Otto scratch AI, Otto farm and more, which all fail to perform; we invested lots of resources, money and time on them without earnings.

We developed our own graphical programming software with zero experience, thanks to the great help of standing on others shoulders and working openly. Those were times when I was happy to be in the open source community, but we still have to do a lot on our own without expertise or help.

There was a race to the bottom price “mistake” competing with yourself and scummy companies, trying to make it globally accessible and cheap. It really hurt the product experience and worst of all the brand.

For a long time there was a big limitation in the project by using only "out off shelves" common components. Soon, we reached the boundaries of what was possible in terms of design and product at that size, regrettably we were stubborn because we wanted to keep the community “happy” and like this technology development for the robot got stuck for many years.

Batteries included dilemma

The power source was and is! the main component for a robot, that show me the reality of open source hardware, no matter how much you optimize the design in order to have a portable consumer product that anyone from everywhere can replicate, you will always be restricted by battery power with big tradeoffs, sometimes to the point of making the product barely functional. I fall into that hole, as a DIY weekend project is ok but not as a Product that someone is paying money for, nevertheless we developed 2 different power sources, fully rechargeable, that we started to include in our kits and none else did; if you buy a fake Otto it never comes with battery, hence is the main issue when people come to the community because they don't buy the original kit.

We had great partnerships to produce Ottos in Spain with Bitfab 3D printer farm expert Diego and in France with Sebas. New cool robots like Ninja and collabs like Ottoky with Tokylabs Eduardo, but it could not really lift off as a startup, we barely sustained the company. We tried to do customs components to improve the tech, but scarcity of chips pulled us down.

Amazing help we got from teachers feedback and collaborators like Ivan, Oscar, Jason, Hanka, Chico with the App was spectacular! and the few remaining community leaders kept the project floating; the ones that gave their 2 cents at some point for a few moments kept us alive but eventually they had to do their own jobs, we constantly freelance jobs and some became part of the team, others just had other plans in life.

We keep fighting trying to survive in the corporate world with big disadvantages and unfair battles…. but having a Community unloyal to the brand, which never really cared (confirmed in a survey), even after all the effort we put to stand out to create awareness. Take and leave members, ungratefulness and haters slowly make us exhausted, why am I helping these people? It was almost a philanthropy, at least we had little boosts when we saw someone sharing photos saying thanks, specially in places that never had the chance to build a robot, low income families. That was our payment as a social enterprise.

Reality for an open source startup

We got a nice deal with Sparkfun. This was great for the American market but it didn't last and had enough traction; we had to invest in their stock ourselves in advance, meaning we only got payment after that was sold, very bad for the cash flow.

Even as certified open source hardware most distributors abandon us or never even try to buy from us, instead bought from other bad knockoffs; everyone pretends to understand the open source licensing and after you explain how is supposed to be, they just ignored the fact that they are cheating, no respect at all for the project. There was cynicism by many online shops founded by “makers“ or/and from well developed countries in Europe and America that sold similar kits but didn't even bother to contact us and decided to cut costs and resell counterfeits instead, did not even give credits or promoted the original project. Those ironically are the first ones to ask for files when a new robot comes out, so they can make more money out of it. We were happy to see when someone in South America or Africa was doing a business based on Otto DIY but it doesn't add up when someone in developed countries is making money and we are sinking. Many will say: "oh but that is open source" and yes it is, but then goodbye to Otto because who will pay the bills? new companies emerged based on Otto but they did not keep us in the loop or even wanted to cooperate.

Slowly we ran out of cash flow and none wanted to commit to big orders but wanted huge discounts without margin for us, nowhere else to scale and hard to grow a team without capital.

Moravia consulting comes to the rescue

2022 came with a great opportunity, a merger with Moravia Consulting under the same mission of bringing affordable STEAM education to schools.

Now we could leverage well established logistics and relationships with big companies (Like HP) to finally scale the project to where it deserves to be… A busy year of deep R&D was coming but at least now I could focus 99% on it. A team was forged including extra multiple freelancers to bring a new ecosystem to life by fixing everything that was frustrating in terms of hardware and tailor the needs of all schools.

Everything that was an issue or complaint in Otto DIY from our educators has been addressed, when working with children, their attention is easily lost and the teacher has to take the robot aside to troubleshoot losing the whole lesson.

In order to satisfy the teacher's needs, we had to take the custom PCB route (and I had to learn how to do that properly 😀). There is no other way, we also need a stable supply chain, which at the end made it more accessible (right now many people have problems outsourcing parts, look at ninja). Makers, DIY and hobby communities come and go, they will go for the low end option and they will “figure out” the rest, but they stop bringing contributions to the project (apart from a few guys) at the end it is about the building experience and that was our priority for a classroom environment.

Fast forward to 2024 we launched our first flagship product in BETT! HP Robots | Otto Starter Creator and Builder Kit

Will it still be “open source”?

Good question! it is a very relative word, like full transparency? that doesn't really even exist, it is very utopic, we have always been as much open source as possible and everyone knows maybe too much, but most of the time it just creates noise, overwhelms and usually people just want STLs with code so that will be fine! We already provide everything that gives freedom to the community to create modify, redesign, we are up to that, but of course it gets tricky with licensing involved and new high quality customized components, many of the electronics we have developed even by having the source files a regular maker would not even be able to replicate without a big investment or cost, here is where everybody gets confused, they won't be able to claim is HP and would not work properly without the right quality standards, then if out there it will damage the product or brand reputation itself and that was a terrible thing that happened to us multiple times and we can not allow.

Open source means stl files for 3d printing are free?

In that case it is still open source but most of the people won't even be able to replicate without the original electronics.

In conclusion, you are getting STL files for 3D printing, don't worry 😀 even free starter lessons! and other stuff. But we might reserve some premium stuff only available for loyal members of the community or supporters or partners, which you can always ask to be!

It is interesting for a physical product all the stuff could be open source nevertheless you see in any hardware company that claims themselves open usually at least one of thing is missing (code or 3d files or software or electronics or manual guides), in Otto DIY we are keeping all these aspects still open for what it corresponds to "DIY" but we won't even have time to curate it, nowadays people aren't giving back to the community. It is kind of sad I miss the good old days when the community had a better loop, maybe it will come back if we see more nice people around now that we are with HP.

Now it is time-consuming to just do a proper documentation that fits everyone diverse needs, like it happened in the past with Otto Blockly many experts criticized the project and we really did not know what we did wrong, most of the time we feel attacked by some random folks telling us that we did not provide something that fits their specific picky needs, like porting on a very specific type of Linux, when they could have help us to improve even with just creating an issue in github or fixing bugs which they had the knowledge for. Sorry but we did what we could, that is the reason why many people is afraid to share their creations as open source on the internet, they are afraid to be judged, for me was always a learning experience but in the fields of robotics is very hard to be able to solve all issues in mechanics, electronics, firmware, code, libraries and software all together without a team. I tried to the maximum extent and thanks to all contributors that put their grain but a limit was reached.

Open Source sometimes is a utopian philosophy; it becomes disappointing in practice as it meets the reality in this world, at least in hardware and for this specific “educational robotics” segment.

I share many thoughts that Josef Prusa described here in his blog post.

Comparing us to Prusa it is not even as apples to apples but more people need a 3d printer than a simple “toy robot” look at all the categories they cover, very few a "robot toy" that is a much bigger market for them and at least they have a loyal fan base eager to try the next product and still they struggled with the unfair competition just grabbing their software.

Open Source had worked for Arduino (even with their rather dark past) or Adafruit but at least their community has been loyal and they had plenty of orders to sustain a company. Again the same formula as Prusa at least they had a big community to support them, most of you had no idea what was happening behind Otto DIY and even so we did not go into details it was pretty clear that it was just a “one man show” from the financial point of view.

This video shows what I am trying to convey:

“I think the open-source thing is over-rated.. Ultimately you want a good experience for the user. open or closed source”

CrabRC, member of the Otto community.

As a "manufacturing entity" you must provide stock for a long time. It is different when it is just for fun than when you have to maintain a startup and all other boring aspects.

Now with Moravia I have the chance to focus on developing a great product without worrying about cost, the best user experience and still delivering a competitive product to the market.

Everyone is welcome to hang around in our community or social media anytime we don't exclude anyone of course now you have 2 options so first ask yourself:

1. Am I a teacher that wants a smooth learning experience for my students? Go to hprobots website.
2. Am I here to spend a long time on a hobby, figure out all, debug and troubleshoot? Go to ottodiy facebook or discord.

Project (DIY) vs Product (HP)

It is important to clarify the distinction between "Otto DIY" (hobby project ottodiy.com) and our new licensed products "HP Robot Otto" (educational kits hprobots.com):

The new Otto now formerly called “HP Robot Otto” is not a replacement but an upgrade for the education industry, teachers around the world were begging for a better solution for their classroom and it is here finally! Think of it as a new member of the Otto family that decided to work with Moravia for HP.

"Otto DIY" as the acronym means has always been "Do It Yourself". It requires more expertise and work to use.

After all, in the early feedback we received, many people from the community are happy with this decision and that just proves that we took the right path, but we wanted to make it all clear in case someone is out of context and thinks of it as a threat for the DIY project. Teachers or schools can sign up for pilots and stay tuned for news.

HP supports our decisions and plans. It is licensed, so it gives us the freedom to be creative in many aspects as long as it is in line with their brand, which we are happy to follow because we share a similar vision in terms of technology and how it will help humanity. Moravia and HP have a long term relationship since they took over HP calculators business. Think of it as a startup inside Moravia, inside the HP education department. We are 3D printing plastic parts in our own farm Europe with materials made in the Czech republic.

I hope this makes things clear and we can keep DIY as a project alive while supplying HP product solutions to schools in need for STEM + A education.

For more details head over to HP Robots FAQs page.

If any comment let me know below, see you in the community!

Camilo