Krisjanis Rijnieks Makes Almost Anything
Fab Academy Documentation Website

© Krisjanis Rijnieks 2021

Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International

Week 19

In this section I will describe what steps I will take during and after the course to spread the information about my project (or product) and what would be its possible future.

Below you can see my final project presentation slide. I kept it all black and white to emphasize the minimal aspect of the project. Grids and details stand for the underlying complexity and professional use of it.

Final Project Slide

And here is the final project presentation video (also available for download here).

Dissemination

The main tool for disseminating information of the project will be its website. I bought the domain umap.io and connected it with my web server. I believe in websites as presentation tools. A website remains available and visible even without you being at a specific location. It is crawlable and thus can be found on the internet by using one of the search engines.

I plan to have a development blog on the website where I will describe the further development of the project. The Fab Academy documentation goes this far, but there are still some iterations ahead before I could launch uMap as a product.

I want uMap to be open source software and hardware. I want to publish the designs online and make it possible for the people to be able to print and produce it themselves or at least be able to fix problems themselves if they occur.

Crowdfunding

Once I get a solid working prototype, I want to make a crowdfunding campaign to fund the production of, say, 100 units. According to my recent calculations, the money to be gathered could be in the range between 5,000 and 10,000 EUR. If the material expenses for 20 units is 820 EUR, for 100 of them it would be 4100. I have to add shipping expenses, injection molding services, PCB manufacturing as well as legal expenses to the list. Would be also nice to get paid for one month of work on top of that also. Thus 10,000 EUR seems like a realistic estimate for the goal of the first uMap crowdfunding campaign.

Crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter or Indiegogo would be used for the campaign. Most probably I will do it from Germany and Kickstarter is well supported there since it is OK to register as a freelancer with a valid German bank account.

Things to consider regarding a campaign is a precise estimation of expenses. As mentioned above, material expenses are not the only ones. There are services that I will have to purchase on top to make it happen. One of the most important things for a campaign is a good video. I will need someone with professional sound design and camera skills. I could do editing myself, but it may be better if I have someone to do it. These expenses would be added to the crowdbunding campaign goal.

The so called rewards have to be figured out for different values of pledges. This could be as traditional as a sticker and device itself (or a batch) or something original as having a prototyping session together, having a hackathon on a beach, the list can go on here.

Licensing

Since I want uMap to be open source, I have to think about licensing of the software and hardware parts.

For the software part I still can not decide between MIT and GNU GPL licenses. Both of them are good.

I use the MIT license for my open source projection mapping software ofxPiMapper as the host platform openFrameworks uses it. The main points of the MIT license are:

  • Everyone can use the code for free
  • It does not matter if the derrivative is proprietary
  • One should refer to the original license / author in case the resulting software is being used and redistributed

The GNU General Public License is a bit more restrictive than the MIT license. In general it permits anybody to use, study and re-distribute the source of the software. One can sell the derrivative software at any price, but the source should remain open and the same GPL license terms should be applied.

GPL licensed software are not compatible with Non-Disclosure-Agreements or illumitati deals. The main difference is that software licensed under the terms of GNU GPL should never be proprietary, which I prefer conceptually.

For the hardware part the licensing is a bit different. As explained in the Open Source Hardware Wikipedia page, open source hardware rely more heavily on patent rather than on copyright law.

Open source hardware is hardware whose design is made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell the design or hardware based on that design.

From the list of open source hardware licenses, the ones I would like to choose most likely are the CERN Open Hardware License or TAPR Open Hardware License. Another option is to use a Creative Commons license.

Here is an interesting article, an Introduction to Open Hardware Licensing and they discuss the same two CERN and TAPR licenses mentioned above.

Workshops

As I have done with my open source projection mapping software ofxPiMapper, I would like to continue to run workshops with the uMap device. It would be perfect for multilayered workshop content production as one could show a one-hour demo where one could experience projection mapping installation adjustment capabilities of the device, a four-hour one to explore the web interface of it and a two-day one to learn how to create generative content for it.

A connected project would be the Radical Projection Mapping lab. I described the production of the integrated radical projection box in the Computer Controlled Machining week.

Services could be offered to produce exclusive content for the uMap device. Would it be an exhibition venue, a design shop or a night club, uMap could be used to map unique content on the walls and objects of the space.

Conclusions

As for the Fab Academy I wanted to develop something that would include the steps described above. My goal was to produce a working prototype that could be used as a base for a crowdfunding campaign.

There is a bit more to it than developing the prototype itself. There are additional things to do. I would say that the prototype is 50% of the whole thing. I still have to figure out a lot of things, starting from the website development to calculating production costs for 100 units and creating a campaign video.

It will still take me another six months to take the prototype to a level of a crowdfunding campaign.

As for the licensing, I feel like choosing GNU GPL for the software. For hardware it is less clear for me, but I might go for the CERN license (because it sounds cool) or a version of the Creative Commons license as it seems well supported and documented.