19. Invention, intellectual property and income¶
Dissemination¶
The project I am developing is an interactive storm cloud. This iteration is in the form-factor of a small desk lamp, but the project is designed to be scaled up as well.
I’ve seen other projects similar to this, but none that have produced a realistic lightning storm effect. The projects I’ve seen were either lit statically, just flashed the entire cloud, or changed color.
They typically used analog RGB or single color LED strips.
Mine uses programmable LED’s, so each LED can be lit up independently. So, while there are similar projects, my project is just more complex. Most of the code used for the various animations are mine, some of
them are based on open-sourced code. Because of this, I knew I couldn’t patent or copy-write the entire project, but I did look into doing so with some of the components. I designed a custom circuit board to
run the LED’s so that was a copyright or patent option. In addition, the code used to get all of the separate animations to run and interact with the ultrasonic sensor is entirely mine. After much thought, I
decided that bringing something like this to commercial market was impractical. Ultimately, I would like to scale this up and turn it into a large art exhibit. We have two large art and technology festivals
near where I live. My future goal would be to scale this up and make a few huge clouds people could interact with. The FabLab already does outreach work with the festivals, so getting a space to do so is
a real possibility. Unfortunately, the Covid pandemic cancelled the festivals for the foreseeable future, but I plan to use the time to work on procuring materials and applying for grants to help bring this
large scaled Nimbus to life.
That, and I think that programming LED’s to produce animations is both fun and exciting, so I’d like this code to be available and free to use.
Although I don’t plan on bringing my project to market, I don’t want others to profit from all of my work. I decided to use a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
This will allow people to adapt, modify, improve, and share the material, but not use it for commercial purposes. The same license must also be used when shared, which should help keep it open.
Slide and video links¶
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.