19. Invention, intellectual property and income

Throughout my FabAcademy journey, one of the discoveries I have found most impressive and inspiring has been the underlying philosophy of sharing and collaborating pervasive in the network. We make…with the help of others (standing on their shoulders). We make…to share.

Dissemination

My final project, if it functions reasonably well…and if others find value in it…I would want to share, make it open source. It is my hope that those motorcylists who would make and use my device…will be safer on the roads.

  • I will likely make a simple webpage for the device with housing and electronics design file available for download.

  • For licensing, based on the license selection application on the Creative Commons website, the license that meets my wishes…

  • Adaptations of my work can be shared…as long as others share as well

  • No commercial use of my network

is “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International”

Creative Commons Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Future Opportunities

I consider my final project a prototype. A learning device where I discover what is possible…where there are limitations and where there is room for improvement. With the final presentation done, I see lots of room for improvement, namely…

  • Device size needs to be reduced to be more portable
  • Electronics need to be more robust and wiring more organized inside the device
  • Waterproofing also critical if the device is going to have real world motorcylist use outdoors
  • Additional road safety functionality needs to be added (requiring an Acclerometer and Gyroscope, and other sensors)…such as brake light and turn indicator linkages, auto-hazzard light in low visibility day-time conditions (fog, heavy rain), mobile app interface, etc.

If I can eventually get the device to reach a level of refinement that I am happy with, I may consider professionally producing it on a small scale to sell in local shops to test market demand. I am guessing that another 6 months of device refinement time would be required at minimum.

Draft Slide & Video

Slide file here

Video file here

(…these are final files, draft versions already deleted)