19. Invention, Intellectual Property, and Income¶
assignment
- 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
Dissemination¶
Other than being hosted on FabCloud, I intend to publish my work on more platforms i.e. Instructables, Wikifactory, etc.
Linking to the Income part, a great way of dissemination is crowdfunding. A couple of references I gathered to conceptualize the idea started with crowdfunding campaigns and now are fully stablished products on the market.
A great suggestion from another student is going to delivery startups like Glovo and offer/ask for a trial with their cyclists. It is a huge community that have the core problem I try to solve with this device.
Intellectual Property¶
Neil’s class made it clear how big this field is and you can get into a big rabbit hole and complications if you try to protect your work too much.
Patents are absolutely out of question. Mainly for my lack of interest in the way they work. Most of my work was possible by using open-source tools, snippets of code or community help.
My goal is to keep this accessibility or even extend it further. But since this is a commercial product, and I still haven’t decided if I’ll keep developing it. I’ll look for a license that allows people to reproduce and mix it, without necessarily making profit out of it.
I’ve seen many Creative Commons licenses throughout all my work and research in the maker community. It seems to be a simple but functional solution.
I found this diagram showing how to choose the right license.
On top of that, their website have a tool that generate even the text description and logo out of your answers.
https://creativecommons.org/choose/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
I’ll include this license throughout my website and project files.
Income¶
My decision to make this project was mainly based on what I’d learn from it. It started without any commercial intentions even though it is a product.
But still, other than the traditional crowdfunding or investment, there are a lot of possibilities to make this project profitable.
The most interesting aspect for me is the possibility to customize it for a number of specific purposes. For example, it could be tailored for bike delivery, with “Accept” and or “Finish” buttons. So that the biker don’t need to draw his phone in any stages of the process.
Another interesting solution would be a safety device. Alerting authorities or relatives in case of a crash. This is specially helpful for solo bikers commuting or doing trails.
One big market as well would be customize a solution for the city’s bikes systems. Transforming it into a smart bike, with the ability to lock and unlock it, track location, usage, etc.
Presentation drafts¶
Slide¶
In order to get the drafts in place, I simply hopped in Photoshop and created a 1920x1080 canvas and exported as png.
Video¶
But then, i wanted to create a .mp4 draft without wasting much repository and history size. After a quick research I managed to get ffmpeg to generate a 1 min .mp4 video just by looping a png file for 60 seconds.
ffmpeg -loop 1 -i video.png -t 60 -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:v libx264 -movflags +faststart -profile:v baseline -level 3.0 presentation. mp4
Other than working, it is even smaller than the original png (that’s some next level wizardry)
It works fine on chrome but it doesn’t on safari. So I spent a while researching in order to find that safari requires a H.264 Baseline Level 3.0 profile to play. So I adjusted the ffmpeg encoding option to match this. Unfortunately, the video now isn’t smaller than the .png. But it is still acceptable (112KB). I won’t spend any more time for now playing with this.