14. Invention, intellectual property and income

Patents are expensive and useless if you haven’t an army of lawyers, so I go to a creative commons license. Because I want to make a retrofit kit for owners of the same litter and may be sell a few one, I choose this license, with this I let people reproduce my work for personal purpose but not sell or modify it :

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

I will split this project in 2 versions :

  • a basic version with just a replacement board and new front cover to have a better reliability than the original board
  • an extended version with network connectivity, but for this I have to also work on data. Let user do all configuration and find free or paid platform or install their own system? Or use my own server and host all ?

To avoid a very high price, may be I have to remove tag reader or work on my own cheaper reader, the actual reader cost 40€ just for this part.

Here a quick resume of the split of versions :

For the fabAcademy, in order to finish in time, I focus on offline version. I choose to work in spirals.

Spiral 1 (FabAcademy target) :

  • new front cover
  • SAMD21E board that uses sensors and TFT + touchscreen (use the lolin screen I have at Agrilab)
  • A4953 driver

Spiral 2 :

  • rework electronic on a smaller optimized board after validating PoC on spiral 1
  • find another ILI9341 + XPT2046 touchscreen without wemos dedicated pins (use less space)
  • rework front cover to a thinner one

When spiral 2 will be completed and fully tested, I can launch a first batch.

Spiral 3 and more :

  • work on online addon & cat tracking

And after, if it takes too many times of if I want to focus on another project, I will change it to a full free license and switch to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Draft presentation video full screen here :

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And the slide fullscreen here :