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 root directory
Future Steps and Dissemination Plan
I spent most of this week actually working on the final project. I planned ahead to make sure I'd have time for major disasters (like redesigning and rebuilding the board from scratch), but it became more clear as the week went on that the project was actually going to work. This forced me to think about next steps.My original plan was to create a camera that could display 3-d fields acting at a distance, by using matheematical data inversion to infer the location of magnetic dipoles based on the sensor data. As the project matured, I realized that I wouldn't have time for that, but also that the device was quite useful even in its easier "planar" mode, which simply reports the magnetic field passing through the sensor plane. I would still like to get the "remote camera" mode working. Once the hardware is built and the presentation is done, I will continue tinkering with that.
I designed this project to be useful for my own physics classes, but I think it might be very useful for other teachers as well. I don't really have the time and energy to market it as a commercial product, but I think I'll pursue the "academic dissemination" route: develop an organized assembly manual and lab manual, publish the design as an open-source project, ake a Youtube video, and possibly write it up for a physics education journal.
But as a first step before that, I'll show it to some of my colleagues in the physics department and see what they think. I did show it to some fellow Fab Academy students, and their main comment was that they wished the screen were brighter. Which is totally true, this is a much cheaper screen than their modern smartphone screens, but I'm not sure I can do much about that, smartphone screens expensive and not microcontroller friendly.
Slide Production
In our group lab assignment, we made a quick rough draft of a possible poster for our project, and then discussed them. We were asked to think about our target audience in doing so. I thought of my target audience as physics instructors, and created something that might work as a sales page for a science education web store:
The feedback from this was that first, it had way too many words, and second that people weren't sure whether "BCAM" was a brand name or a word they should recognize. The first criticism I think comes from a misunderstanding on my part: it wasn't clear to me whether we were supposed to create a short, catchy ad for our product, or a more detailed "sales brochure". I think my target audience of physicists is comfortable with more words: physics lab vendor sites are full of tech specifications and use-case language.
But I took both of these criticisms to heart when coming up with my final poster presentation, which is a little less wordy, a little more image-driven, and makes "BCAM" more obviously a trademark. Here's my final poster:
Video Editing
I learned to use Adobe Premiere for video editing, following the video tutorial created by our instructor. To begin creating my video, I made a list of shots I wanted to film, paired with a script for the voiceover. I then recorded the voiceover, and created simple black-screen-with-text placeholders for the video shots.Shot List:
- Canned shot of Earth's magnetic field (NASA?)
- Shot of me doing magnetic field equations
- Students looking confused
- Long hero shot of final project, showing basic operation
- Shots of applications (field from a wire, Earth's field, etc)
- Mechanical design (Ken Burns effect?)
- Electronics schematics and board design (Ken Burns?)
- Double-sided PCB
- Students playing with final project
Script for video clip:
Invisible magnetic fields are all around us. Teachers and students in physics classes try to visualize them with equations and diagrams, but nothing's as good as hands-on experience.That's why we created the BCAM digital magnetic field viewer. Its network of twenty-four magnetic field sensors provide students with a real-time map of the 3-dimensional structure of magnetic fields created by everything from powerful permanent magnets to wires carrying electric current, to the Earth itself.
BCAM's design includes a convenient touchscreen interface. It has an iron-free design and includes a built-in calibration tool for maximum accuracy. Internally, BCAM uses the powerful RP2040 microcontroller, with I2C address reprogramming to communicate with 24 sensors dozens of times a second. The double-sided PCB allows for a compact and robust design.
BCAM is perfect for anyone who's curious about the magnetic world around them. Teachers, try BCAM in your classroom today, and help your students see the invisible!
Royalty-free Music
Following a link from some of our instructor's previous work, I found Bensound.com, which has a range of interesting royalty-free music for download. I chose the track Summer, which sounds tranquil, curious, technical, and inoffensive. I was going for the sort of thing you'd hear in a corporate product video.This site requires you to include a royalty-free license code in your video, so I did that.
Music I use: Bensound
License code: WSKQ1AR0ZI4CGZGL
Draft Video
This week, I did not get to the point of adding more than just basic shot lists and timings to the video. The actual project isn't close enough to complete to be filmed!
Final Video
After presenting, I went back and added my final video to this week's assignment, for comparison:
Licensing
For now, I have chosen the CC-BY-NC-SA license for this project. This is a fairly restrictive option, which allows others to remix and build upon my work, but only for non-commercial purposes, only if they attribute me, and only if they use the same license.
This should ensure that I am the only one who can profit commercially from this project, and will prevent someone from creating their own remix with a commercial license and selling that.
Should I choose to go the non-commercial route to promoting this device, I may re-release the project under a more open CC-BY license that allows for commercialization of derivative work. (My understanding is that I can't revoke the rights and permissions already given by the original CC-BY-NC-SA license, but I can release an even-more-open version. A tricky distinction!)