Intro

The goal for this assignment is to define a license, an eventual business plan and a dissemination plan for the project.

When thinking to my final project I had in mind a specific scenario and several contexts of use. The project was conceived as a way to practice with digital fabrication techniques and developed for personal interest. However it could have a future and there is a lot of space for future developments. One of the strengths of my project is that it has a specific purpose and has a good User Experience. Moreover it is also a base that could be expanded adding other features (i.e. other sensors, other outputs other functionalities). The FabDuck is a social robot, it means that it is not a simple tool but is something that you choose for the different kind of interaction you have with. At present there are many examples in the market (as described in applications and implications) that shows that the success of a product could be related to the User Experience and even if it could be felt like an expensive gadget it could have many applications. For this reason I think that the best way is to left the project open and let the community help me to improve the project.

Licensing

I think that the project should be left open source to allow people to improve it and to adapt it to their needs. I imagine it as a "platform" that can be expanded and used for different purposes, as an example:

• research about affective computing and social robots
• fun
• environmental monitoring
• gamification (moving people to do something)

For all the documentation about how to make a Fabduck I want to use a Crative Commons licence with attribution, non-commercial and share alike.

Software

For the software and the design models I will use the GPL v.3 license . This license is one of the most used for the software distribution as it is based on the 4 essential freedoms written by Richard Stallman:

• The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Moreover as I'm using third parts services as Yahoo Weather I cannot use it for commercial purposes unless to pay a fee.

The Fabduck projects, including code, electronic boards and 3D models is meant to build a social robots designed to live inside a pool. It reads some data from sensor mounted on an Arduino compatible board and shares the data on the web in different modalities. You can find a detailed description here http://fabacademy.org/archives/2015/eu/students/dibitonto.massimiliano/final_project.html Copyright (C) 2015 - Massimiliano Dibitonto max (dot) dbt (at) gmail (dot) com This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>. This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.

Dissemination

The project page on the Fabacademy website is a good starting point. Moreover all the code and the design files are on Github. To make people know my project I will bring it at the European Maker Faire in Rome in October 2015 inside the Frosinone FabLab booth. Moreover I want to contact magaers of public pools to know it they want to host one. Another strategy could be open a Kickstarted project to fund my project and look for design contests.

Business Model

I think that, to face the market, the project should be improved addign features and options to customize it. However as I will leave the project open the revenues could come in 2 ways: selling the object and giving services.

Making, selling and customizing the Fabduck

Even if the project is open, indeed, maybe someone wants the Fabduck in its pool but he/she haven't the skills to make it. So I can sell the assembled product. The Fabduck costs to me 45€ so I could not charge it too much (maybe sell at 65 €). However if you have a look at the average price of this kind of high tech gadgets this is quite a normal price, that means it can be afforded by my target. Moreover I can customize it according to the customer's needs. And the customization could also changing a little bit the scenario. Indeed I can imagine a sensor network to control pollution in the water (i.e rivers, lakes etc) made by Fabducks that shares data directly with the citizens. And maybe encourages them to have a more sustainable behaviour.

I'm planning also to expand the system adding other elements, separated from the Fabduck but networked with it. So I can sell a chlorine dispenser that can erogate chlorine when the sernsor and the Fabduck say that it is necessary.

Services

The system relies on some web services. Then I want to make a webpage from where the user could configure some behaviours of the Fabduck (I imagine something like IFTTT ). Maybe I can sell "extra" features for a monthly fee. However this is still to be developed.

Downloads

• GPL License for the code