Viam
Introduction
The Viam Documentation Developer Portal provides documentation and tutorials to help you build and program robots. The page is open-source and uses the docs as code approach to make it easy for our technical writers to write the docs but also for our community to contribute.
Why nominated
Best Onboarding
The onboarding experience offers a ~3 min long intro to the platform, as well as a trial experience that allows you to rent and remotely configure and control a rover. This allows you to get started and try our APIs within minutes and without buying any hardware. You can use the rented rover or your own hardware to try one of various tutorials to program your own robots. All of this is possible without providing credit card details because the first $5 of usage is free each month.
Best Visual Design
The visual design of the page is consistent with the entire platform: Brutalist but playful - inspired by mid 90s computers. On top of a clear structure, it features visuals of robots in action to make concepts more approachable through real-life examples.
Best Served API Business Model
Viam APIs are organized by the functionality you need in robots. If you have a motor in your robot, there's a motor component in the components section for the related API. If you need to detect objects using a camera, there is a camera component with its API which then links you to a Vision Service which allows you to add object detection. And if you don't find exactly what you need within the existing components and services, you can extend the platform with custom resources by using community-built resources or by building your own.
For each API, there are code snippets and linked tutorials that show you exactly how to code your robots. If you have a question, there is an AI chatbot to help and if that isn't enough, you can also connect with a person or with our community.
