develop a plan for dissemination of your final project
Let us first take a closer look at the idea and the intention behind it.
I would like to develop a modular robot system.
I want the system to be as versatile as possible, and it should also be manufactured as easily as possible.
Furthermore, I would like to learn how to provide materials that can be implemented with the system.
How should my idea continue after Fabacademy?
Let's take a closer look at this.
Income?
Which target group do I have and how do I bring it to the people?
Community/Courses?
What is to be produced where, how and by whom?
What can be developed around the system?
Under which license should the idea be available?
The goal behind this idea was never to make a lot of money. Since I developed this idea because the current system available on the market for individuals and also in masses for schools often are too expensive in my opinion. Therefore I can imagine selling the system at cost price. Of course you have to divide it up a bit because the idea is based on several different pillars. First the parts for the body of the robot, then the electronic parts which can be replaced by other microcontrollers and maybe the materials to be developed.
My user group consists of people who like to build and develop robots themselves and of people who just want to quickly build a first robot to put it into operation. This could be single persons or schools and universities who want to use the system in teaching and learning. This is of course a broad group of users with different requirements. Therefore the system should be as intuitive as possible. But to know exactly what the user group wants I plan to test the system in my robotics club as well as in the university to develop the idea together with potential users.
I will also try to develop a community around the system where users can further develop the system. For this purpose we can offer courses for students at our Fablab, where the students can get a basic kit with parts and we can work together with them and the students can take part in the courses at our Fablab. This will let them further develop the robots according to their own ideas.
At the moment I produce the components and also the electronics in our fablab.
Robot corpus
For users who have their own printer, I can simply provide the 3D templates
and the rest of the materials can be bought in the hardware store.
But not everyone has a 3D printer and even schools don't necessarily want to
glue the robots together first.
I would like to produce finished sets with components at cost price, because
mass production with 3D printers would be expensive and our printers are also
needed in the fablab.
Therefore I am testing how these parts can be produced in other ways, e.g.
with injection molding or casting.
As we have a cooperation with the workshops in Bottrop they could produce the
system in larger quantities.
Electronics
The electronic components can be manufactured in the laboratory for small
requests, but or bigger requests the effort would be too much.
If you order the boards in a bulk order from a company, they are not so expensive.
Alternatively you can also use ready made boards on the market like Arduino,
raspberry pi, m5stack and many more.
As mentioned above, I would also like to provide learning materials for the system so that the user groups get an easy access to the system. Furthermore, I would like to continue working on the app with which I have already started and with which you can control the robot. There should also be instructions on how to assemble the robots and components and users should be able to upload their own ideas.
My project is licensed under theCreative Commons - Attribution - Non-Commercial - Share Alikelicense.
Wy?
If you take a closer look at the licenses they contain first.
Attribution -> Which means that I am called a
developer in my own right.
NonCommercial -> It was important to me from the beginning to develop a freely available system which everyone can
print out easily. Therefore there should be no profit in printing and selling the files.
ShareAlike -> If you change the files which is desired you have to call me as developer at this place.