FAB ACADEMY 2015

Invention, intellectual property and Income

On wednesday 05.27.2015 we’ve got the seventeenth online lesson with Neil Gershenfeld.
The next lessons can be found on the Fab Academy account on Vimeo.

For this week the assignment was

develop a plan for dissemination of your final project

License

Chose the correct license for a project is a very strategic step in order to trigger a good spreading of the project.
Use a patent may become very expensive and at the end of the day ineffective.
This project should be distributed in Creative Commons.

There are several different CC license, depending on what you want to ward and the nature of the project itself. In this case I choose Attribution, Non commercial, Share alike

LifeTime di David Montenegro è distribuito con Licenza Creative Commons Attribuzione - Non commerciale - Condividi allo stesso modo 4.0 Internazionale.

The website cretivecommons.org provides a good guide to produce your license and all the informations related.

Invention

The invention is a personal device to let the user visualize the time, percieve it differently, manage in and collect data about his everyday life routines.

Income

The project will be downloadable upon free donations. Further developments will add more functions, a better design and an optimization of the production to make it a more valuable and desirable product.
For advanced developments a dedicated web-based software that stores, manage and share data about our habits may became an asset.

Funding

It doesn’t require large amount of money to move forward and meets the requirements to launch a crowdfunding campaign.
I actually don’t foresee many people working on this project, just two or three, but without a specific commercial purpose. During this experience I’ve met some people that have appreciated the idea behind it and would collaborate with me for some time to develop different aspects of the project: their support is all the funding the project needs to move on.

What I learned

Before to start this adventure I already used some machine and applied some principles, so has been natural divide the assignments in three categories: manufacturing related, code related and strategic.
Where I’ve learned more than other category is the second one: making circuits and coding starting from registers, read sensors and drive motors is the base to understand more advanced tools.

I’ll copy a paragraph from the Embeeded programming page:

I've to say that has been very hard and frustrating to afford this assignment.
It may seems simple and straightforward, and at the very end the toolchain is indeed, but becoming confident with boolean operations, registers, a debug and a lot of issues is not trivial at all. Obviously I'm still not as confident as I wish, but it will came with time and practice. The hardest part is the motivational one: not being able to keep in mind simple concepts, having troubles handling some simple logical relations but nonetheless being able to follow the process when explained except being unable to repeat it autonomously has make me feel incompetent.
The truth I came along is that playing something for the first time with a hand tied behind my back (I tried just "the hard way") is the fastest and surest way to lose sprint, enthusiasm and motivation, mostly if the output is "abstract".

So at the end, one more time, endurance, patience, lateral thinking, make without think too much but plan and manage time and effort are all lessons that I’ll never stop to learn.