Founding Values
Simplicity
The core value at heart of the Microver Initiative is to always choose the easiest and most straight forward solution to the problem.
You will embark on a potentially very complex project dealing with embedded hardware, time critial interrupts, preloaded bearing assemblies, networks of computers communicating over various interfaces.
This sounds very intimidating but we stand on the shoulders of giants and with a properly designed project, there is a way to reach the same end-goal without much of the pain along the way.
This is a key strength of the Microver Initiative, it is a project that guarantees the dopamine release that follows successful achievements all along the project, while ironing out the unsurmountable pain-points that you could encounter along the way.
But remember, no pain, no gain! To get to the dopamine, you need to suffer a little, so we have left just enough pain in there for you to actually learn something useful and feel accomplished once you manage to get there.
Accessibility
As this project is targetted at complete beginners, the second and equally as important value is the use of solutions that are very common in the community, solutions with lots of documentation, information and videos explaining the various problems you will encounter and how to solve them.
This enables us to piggy-back off of the knowledge present all over the internet without having to explain every concept ourselves. Throughout this documentation on docs.microver.ch, you will be served a wide array of tutorials that other people have made over the years. This is how we guarantee the quality of the education as it would be impossible to reach the educative throughput of a professional online channel that has been concentrating solely on education for the past decade.
In addition, an accessible project means that we need to limit the amount of tools necessary to make the project as much as possible. Everything that somebody can’t produce in their bedroom with our key tools needs to be stocked on our website or readily available online.
The only thing not accessible & hackable is the battery, this is done for safety reasons as it is the only part that can actually go wrong and cause serious harm if built improperly. Every other part is free to be used how ever our builders feel like it and, if ever they break them, they are readily and cheaply accessible on our website for quick and pain-free replacement.
This dramatically lowers the psychological barrier to entry in hardware engineering which is present in every beginners’ mind when they halt themselves from learning due to the worry that: “they might break it”. Our project is built to be broken, short-circuited, blown-up, torn, bugged, bricked and lost. We believe that this is the only real way to learn.
Creativity
One of the core values we hold at heart is the respect of the creative freedom of our community. At microver.ch , we believe that if you really want to learn something through a project, you need to make it out of the passion from your heart which is only possible if:
We give you the freedom to innovate
You listen to your heart
You have to make your rover, not ours and not somebody else’s. You will be encouraged to add your logo, your mascot, your colour, your fancy wheels, your innovative suspension, your optimised communication protocol, your camera gimbal or your robotic arm.
All we teach you is a set of tools and the ways to use them to create a remotely controlled platform with 4 wheels. Everything else and the shape it all takes is up to you and your team.
Some people express their creativity by building the most rigid and precise robotic arm, some others by spending hours designing a super intricate mascot with lots of colours and logos. We deeply encourage you to find what makes your heart sing and to spend time on that.
As a source of inspiration, here is the gallery of the previous rovers built according to the microver initiative:
Open Source
Finally, we believe that the world is better place when it is made up of competent people who love what they do. We believe that one of the greatest strength of our civilization is the widespread access to quality information which enables anyone to learn anything.
For these reasons, we strive to make this project easily accessible to anybody in the community with no paywalls blocking their access to the core information needed to make one of our rovers.
You will notice that the website currently:
Doesn’t run ads of any kind
Doesn’t use any cookies
Doesn’t track you
Doesn’t harvest or sell your information
We also don’t require you create an account and therefore we:
Don’t ask for your email
Don’t ask for your phone number
Don’t ask for your google account
Don’t ask for your name and credentials
All of our information is freely accessible by anyone, anywhere and we would like to keep it this way forever!
Warning
But we also believe that when things are free, you are the product!
As you can imagine, building such a huge hardware edtech project is very costly both financially and in terms of time, therefore we will be relying on other sources of financing which we believe are transparent and ethical (unlike selling your data to temu which is very profitable but ethically debatable).
We therefore ask you to respect and prioritize the resources down below as they make it possible for us to continue this project :
- Sale of various components on the webshop: shop.microver.ch
Official microver.ch kits (core-parts)
Spare parts
Consumables
Various tooling
Merch & Clothing
- Donations
Buy-me-a-coffee
Patreon
Youtube tips