13. Invention, intellectual property and income

The assignment for this week was to develop a plan for dissemination of your final project, as well as prepare drafts of my summary slide (presentation.png, 1920x1080) and video clip (presentation.mp4, 1080p HTML5, < ~minute, < ~10 MB) and put them in my root directory.

Individual Assignment

To start this week, I wanted to go over my motivations of making my final project. I hoped this would clarify plans for dissemination of my project. Primarily, I had made the project so that people could interact with and record places they travelled to. I don’t plan on pushing my project into any market– my project is not a new idea as there are many other softwares that can identify continents. I mainly wanted to use capacitive technology to allow people to remember their happy times.

That being said, I wanted to publish my project with a Creative Commons License-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. This, according to the License page, “lets others remix, adapt, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.” Through this kind of copyright, I hope that others can build on my project without profit in mind and for their own use.

I think in the future, the possibility of growth lies in two places. First is the idea of the project itself: a map that interacts with the user. I could improve the technology and upsize it to a larger scale, making it almost like an interior design piece. I could also play with the outputs more and change it so that it would interact with the user to more easily. Secondly is the concept of capacitive touch and outputs rather than my project on its own. The problem here is that there are many projects using the same fundamental idea, so it would be hard to make my product special. Thus, in the future I am likely to expand on the map idea and make it more interactive and easy-to-use for users.

Here are the drafts of my summary slide and video clip:

Slide

Video

Final Project Progress

This week, I also worked on my final project. I wanted to test out a board that would have both input and output on it, so I designed a board that was like a combination of my input and output week boards. I used an ATtiny1614, added the I2C connections, and 3 capacitive sensor setups. This is what the board looked like:

I also designed a board that shared a charge pin–I wanted to see if I could save microcontroller pins. I added four sensors on this one.

After sending the boards to Mr. Rudolph and getting the milled boards back, I soldered all the components on the three sensor board.