17. Invention, intellectual property and income

Individual assignment for this week:

• Develop a plan for dissemination of your final project
• Prepare drafts of your summary slide (presentation.png, 1920x1080) and video clip (presentation.mp4, 1080p HTML5, < ~minute, < ~10 MB) and put them in your website's root directory

Dissemination plan

The idea for my final project came from my own need and I wanted to combine and possibly expand my understanding of what I learned at the Fab Academy. The final project, which you can see on these pages, is the first prototype. If and when I develop the project further is something that I will leave for the future.

There would still be a lot of development work to be done on this knitter's smart accessory project. I would like to make the bracelet smaller, and a lot of this will be affected by the design and production of the electronics. It would also be interesting to test what kind of sensors I could use for developing knitting helpers. The final project version is now what I have been able to do in this time and with this knowledge.

I don't think I would make this into a commercial product, but I could think that this could be an interesting and easy electronics project for people who are interested in knitting. Especially the LED ring could be developed as a simple version without a bracelet, so that the project could be used to practice modelling a ring to fit your own finger and possibly making a small circuit board.

If I wanted to advertise the project to potential makers, I would probably start with the various craft and diy projects Facebook groups, there might be some enthusiastic makers and learners.

In the case, if I wanted to monetize the project for educational purposes, I could build a course around the project, which I could then offer to, for example, Taitoliitto or Adult Education Centres. Of course, it would require a Fab Lab or similar type of space to run the project, but I'm sure things could be arranged with some research.

With these thoughts in mind, I planned to use the MIT license for the software in my final project and the Creative Commons CC BY-NC license for the other parts of my final project. These licences allow people with similar interests to use my material as a basis for their own projects.

Drafts of the presentation slide and video

I made a slide draft using Canva's free templates. They are easy to edit. I may end up choosing a different template, but that's where I started. The draft slide is in my website's root directory, so the link below will later take you to the final summary slide.

Draft of the summary slide can be found here.

I made a video draft using iMovie. It's an app I'm familiar with and easy to use on my phone, as a lot of the photos and videos are there too. I'll probably make the final video with iMovie too, if I don't suddenly have time to learn about some other tool for editing videos. I compressed the video with ffmpeg encoding. The draft video is in my website's root directory, so the link below will later take you to the final presentation video.

Draft of the presentation video can be found here.