19. Invention, Intellectual Property and Income¶

Dissemination Steps¶

I’ve planned the following steps for my project. Being a very early stage it’s hard to plan a realistic schedule, but here’s the dissemination plan that I’ve in mind: disseminationplan

Second round of development¶

During the fab academy I focus on to increase my skills in Electronic Design and Production, to make my personal Control Board for the Engraver machine. Here a list of known problem to solve and test:

Increase laser speed
Find new computational module to improve the computation phase and the connection method, without use raspberrypi zero;
improve the way it’s cabled and connected together;
improve status leds;
improve machine status on the web interface;
make a smartphone app.

All the implementations are incremental but not so urgent at the moment. To get to this points I estimate a cost of 500/1000 € and two full time months of development, this means a total of 4000/5000 € at least. The best way to get access to this amount of money is a small local grant, not an investor, an enterprise or a crowdfunding.

First public delivery¶

The project is already public, of course, but I’m not planning to push it until it’s not reliable enough. At least I want improve laser speed and precision movements. After that the plan is to work on five different ways:

Open source release¶

The project is gonna be released in open source to allow everyone to develop new ideas and bring on personal, independent experiments. The licence I’m gonna use is:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Beta testing in fablabs¶

I would like to involve fablabs who need experience in “Machines that Make” through workshops in building the “Engrave Cube”, as a temporary or permanent solution. I could give free support and get back a great support on documentation efficiency and betatesting.

Find different application¶

trying to involve local companies in the use of low-cost digital manufacturing technologies, I would like to focus on the needs of manufacturing companies to find new applications for the “Engrave Cube”.

Crowdfunding the project¶

beside the fundings to support the development of the project, this would be a good idea also to collect feedback and have an idea of how many people would be interested in Engrave Cube. Have being funded gives you also a little bit more reliability when you talk to enterprises to duscuss partnerships, or with other funders.

Second release¶

After all these steps, I think that the Product is ready to get to the market. there are two different way to do that: I can look for partnerships with existing enterprises or go on with a start-up. Evaluate right now what’s the best choise is nearly impossible. I will wait to collect feedbacks and inputs.

Licenses¶

Everything I’m going to do will always be as much accessible as possible and it will always exhist a completely opensource version. This is not necessary exclude partnerships with enterprises to develop commercial versions, even if this is ot my priority and objective right now. Well at the moment I think that this license is right:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.