invention, intellectual property, income

My final project is a very niche product, and really only caters to the small overlap between experimental keyboard users and people interested in music and alternate musical layouts.

license

I’ve decided to license the project and all documentation under CC BY-NC, which is something of a middle ground in terms of restrictivity - it allows copies and derivations with attribution without being “viral” (like the SA clause) but does preclude commercial use by third parties. I don’t see much of a risk for the latter given that my design is very straightforward as far as the electronics are concerned, and the product itself is not very simple to exploit for a quick cash-grab, but perhaps the educational content of parts of my education may be worth protecting in this way.

future

While the response within this niche is good, I don’t think my project as-is is a good enough fit to be able to fund its own production at any scale, which will involve the rather expensive process of injection molding (for the keycaps).

In the future I would like to try crowdfunding a similar device, perhaps focusing only (or more) on the musical features. I am doing more ‘market research’ by interviewing friends and acquaintances within the music industry to improve my design after the FabAcademy.

In the meantime I have partnered with a manufacturer of keycaps for the ‘mechanical keyboard’ hobby community to potentially produce keycaps for that market and apply what I have learned to the production of a macropad:

If this project succeeds, it might lower the barrier to entry for the original direction as well.