How to make (almost) anything.
Week 17. Invention, Intellectual Property, and Income.
Work done in the Lab under the guidance of my remote Instructor to accomplish the weekly assignments.
This week I prepared the dissemination plan for my project and slide and video drafts.
Dissemination plan
Who is my project for?
The conception of my design arises from a real problem, insomnia, which has many possible causes but my device focuses on three mainly: stress, excess information to which we are subjected daily and bad habits before going to bed. Considering that a large percentage of the population can develop insomnia due to these three causes, there is a large audience that I can work with, but I have decided to focus on the population between 40 and 50 years old who exercise a profession and use social networks on a daily basis.
I established the age range considering that younger people are used to solving any kind of need through applications on their smartphone and in this case the direct competition would be free applications such as Breathe and 4-7-8 Breathing, and on the other hand the people over the age of 50 might have trouble manipulating the user interface of the lamp due to its different functions, leading to a frustrating experience for them.
How is it funded?
Crowd funding seems to me to be an option that allows more entrepreneurs to start their business every day, so I think it could help me capitalize to start mass manufacturing these devices. Following the scheme of platforms such as Kickstarter or Fondeadora there will be four levels of rewards: for less than 5 USD a mention of thanks on the website, from 6 to 49 USD the application for Android phones for guided breathing (currently in development), for 50 USD a DIY Breathonome kit and for 60 USD a ready-to-use Breathonome.
Is there a license to protect intellectual properties of my project?
I have no problem with more people being able to benefit financially from my project so originally I had established a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License but upon reviewing the documentation of Daniele Ingrassia and his Satshakit it establishes a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. I don't fully understand what range this license has or what percentage of redesign invalidates it (after my multiple iterations on the Chonikit), but not being able to commercialize my project doesn't really affect me, so I simply adapted to it from Satshakit.
Guided breathing device summary slide draft:
Guided breathing device video draft:
In the final video I want to show all of the processes involved, this one is just a example of the lamp working:
Future possibilities / probabilities
Reduce its dimensions to be able to take it anywhere.
I like the shape, the size and its dimensions seem adequate for the use that is given to it, but I think that if I focus on functionality rather than aesthetics, I can obtain good results. There are people who experience sleep problems when traveling, making a smaller lamp could mean more comfort when it comes to carrying it in luggage.
Independence from the wall outlet.
Integrating a rechargeable battery possibly increases the cost of the lamp but I think it is a great improvement since it would not require being connected to the current all the time and thus it could be placed in different places in the bedroom even without a nearby outlet.
Integrate customization options.
Adding functions such as color selection and programs with different speeds can be striking for many potential users, I think this would be very difficult to integrate in the current user interface that consists of only one button so I would like to add bluetooth connectivity and program these changes from a smartphone in an easier way. These modifications are possible if I keep learning about electronics and programming.
Reduce manufacturing costs.
Redesigning some parts and changing the manufacturing processes could drastically reduce the cost: use plastic casting for the case instead of making multiple acrylic cuts, reducing the number of LEDs or even swapping them out for conventional RGB LEDs (at the end I realized that I don't really need to use neopixels as the animations have low complexity), use another simpler and cheaper microprocessor.
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For this assignment I:
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