19. Invention, intellectual property and income¶

This week’s assignment was pretty light compared to other weeks, but that’s because the final project is coming up and we need all the time we can get to work on it.

The main assignment for this week is to plan for the dissemination of our final projects. This means figuring out things like what license I’ll use with it, whether or not I will publish it, do I want to make it open source, etc. The secondary assignment for this week is just to upload drafts of our final project slides and videos to our root repositories.

Dissemination¶

Since my original inspiration for this project as well as the main function behind it is a commonly used technique in electronics and movement/position sensing in general, I don’t plan to apply for any patents or copyrights for my project. Infrared motion sensing has been around for years, and there are tons of kits out there being sold right now by big companies like Adafruit and Sparkfun that implement it in similar ways to how I am using it myself. I didn’t really come up with the idea, rather, I learned about how to use and implement it into my own work.

I want to make my project open source so that anyone with a fablab in their area can get the necessary materials and simply use my files off of my repo to make the project for themselves. While being open source, I still want to keep some sort of license on my work to stop others from taking it and using it for commercial purposes (making a profit), so I’ll be using a CC BY-NC-SA license, or a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike. What that basically means is that anyone can use, modify, and change my work as long as they give me full credit, don’t use it for commercial purposes, and publish their new work under the exact same license that I have with mine. Obviously since I made my license a non-commercial one, I won’t be trying to use my work for my own profit, either. I also don’t plan to publish my work much farther than to my own site. One day over the summer I might get around to putting it up on instructables, but for now that will have to wait.

Uploading Drafts¶

The next step in my assignment for this week is just to upload drafts of my slide and my video to my root repository. I made a quick example of what my final slide might look like in google slides, which I have uploaded to my repo and which can be found here.

As for the video, I also got a quick test of it uploaded here that you can see. I just used the photo app for windows to convert the file to an mp4 and then I uploaded the new version to my repo.