AtumX studio
Tinkercad for robots. Free.
Hey IH. First post here so going to keep it real.
I work at AtumX. We're a small hardware startup out of Chennai. For the last 4 years we've been making robotics kits for schools. About 500 of them now, across India, USA, UAE, and Australia. Decent traction. Real product. Real customers.
But something kept bugging me at every school visit.
Kid gets a kit. Gets excited. Imagines this cool robot in their head. Then reality hits. They need to find the right parts. Figure out wiring. Solder things. Hope it doesn't smoke. Most of them never finish what they started. Not because they're not smart. Because the hardware kills the momentum before the idea can breathe.
So we started building a tool 6 months ago. The thing we wished we had when we started teaching kids robotics.
It's a free 3D robot simulator. Browser based. Real physics engine. You drag shapes into a 3D space, snap them together, attach motors and sensors, write code, and watch your robot move. Or fall. Or fly. Or fail in funny ways. Same as the real world, except it costs nothing and you can try again immediately.
Three things that make it different from what's out there:
1. It's free-form. Not pre-built robots. You build any shape you imagine. 12-legged spider. Robot dog with wheels for legs. Whatever.
2. Real physics. Bad designs fall over. Good designs work. Honest feedback from the simulation, not animations that pretend everything is fine.
3. Three coding languages. Blockly for beginners. Python for intermediate. C++ for advanced. Same robot, three ways to teach it.
We're calling it AtumX Build. Beta opened last week.
Why I'm posting here:
I've been lurking on IH for a while. Plausible's posts about IH being 22x better than Product Hunt for indie founders is one of the reasons I picked this place over PH for our first launch. We're not going to PH yet. We want feedback from real builders before we go bigger.
Genuine asks:
If you've ever tried to learn robotics or get a kid into it, what stopped you or them? I'm trying to find every blocker we haven't already thought of.
If you're a maker, teacher, or just curious, beta access is open. Free. Browser.
https://atum-x-robot-forge.vercel.app/
Happy to answer anything about the build, the company, the decision to make it free, or the journey from hardware to software (it was painful).
Going to be posting weekly updates on what we learn from this launch. Build in public style. If anyone wants to follow along, easiest place is here.
Thanks for reading.
4 Comments
The "hardware kills the momentum before the idea can breathe" line is the whole insight, and it's the thing most edtech robotics tools miss. You've identified the real failure point, not "kids can't code" but "kids lose the thread between imagining and building because the physical friction is too high." That's a sharp problem to solve.
A few things worth thinking through, since you asked for blockers:
The biggest one you haven't named: who's the buyer vs who's the user. The kid is the user. But the kid doesn't choose tools, doesn't have a budget, and doesn't drive adoption. The teacher or parent does. A free browser simulator is great for the kid, but the person who decides whether 30 kids use it in a classroom is a teacher who needs lesson plans, curriculum alignment, progress tracking, and a reason to trust it over what they already use. "Free and fun" gets individual kids. "Fits my curriculum and saves me prep time" gets classrooms. Those are different products with the same core.
The free decision is interesting and worth pressure-testing. Free is right for adoption, but you already have a hardware business with 500 schools. The simulator probably isn't the revenue play, it's the funnel. Kid builds a spider robot in the sim, gets hooked, wants to build it for real, buys the kit. If that's the model, the simulator should make the path from "I built it virtually" to "I can build it physically with an AtumX kit" frictionless and obvious. The sim is the demo for the hardware. Worth designing that bridge explicitly rather than treating them as separate products.
Your existing 500 schools are the launch channel nobody else has. You're posting on IH for builder feedback, which is right for product validation. But for distribution, those 500 schools across 4 countries already trust you, already teach robotics, and already have the exact kids who'd use this. That's a warm channel most founders would kill for. The IH launch validates the product; the existing customer base is how it actually scales.
What's the connection between AtumX Build and the kits right now — does the simulator map to actual parts a kid can then buy, or are they separate worlds?
The part that stood out to me wasn't the simulator—it was where the idea came from.
Spending years watching people lose momentum before they ever got to experience the fun part gives you a very different perspective than starting with "what should we build next?" Products that come from repeatedly observing the same bottleneck usually solve a much more fundamental problem.
yes, agreed.
We just wanted to solve the problem faced by students of ours.
That's exactly what I was getting at.
The part I'd be curious to unpack isn't whether the simulator solves the bottleneck.
It's whether solving that bottleneck is the product, or whether it's the entry point into a much broader learning experience.
Those can lead to very different product decisions over time.
Happy to explain what I mean if it's useful. What's the best email to reach you on?