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Invention, Intellectual Property and Business Models View Page Source

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

See more info and recording of the lecture here.

License

At the bottom of every page on this website, I claim my copyright over the work that I´ve done in the Fab Academy. I want to choose a permissive license for the work, all I want is to be mentioned if you use part of it in your own project. I thought about one of the Creative Commons licenses, but then I found that Creative Commons don't recommend their licenses for software or hardware. Others that may apply are the MIT license for software and the CERN open hardware license. This is a jungle, and I'm a bit confused. And if I choose a licence, I'll need to include it with all my design files. I don't have time for that right now.

Maybe the "Fab Lab license" that Neil Gershenfeld puts in all his software files on the Fab Academy website would be a good license for my work. But again, I am already stretched to my limits trying to finish all the assignments and the documentation; I can't also go back and modify all the design files to include a license. I can only work from nine in the morning to midnight for so long. I need to see my family at some point.

So for now, the work is copyright, and all rights are reserved. I will revisit this in the near future (I'll review choosealicense.com and Open Hardware Licenses) and see how I can best open the work up for others to use. Feel free to contact me at "svavar at fabisa dot is" to get permission to use the stuff I've made.

Funding plan

I'm not going to start a company around this little robot. But I have applied for and received two grants to develop it.

Grant #1

I applied for the first grant three months before the Fab Academy started. I had been thinking about final projects for a full year, because I was so excited about entering the Fab Academy. I really wanted to make something cool. Then when the deadline for the Icelandic Technology Development Fund rolled around, I had done quite a bit of thinking and I used that thinking to send in an application for the smallest grant of one million ISK (about $7000). And I got it! I used that grant to buy all the parts that I thought I would need for the arm, including molding and casting supplies to make precise gearboxes. The parts that I bought came in very handy, not all of them, but the rest will be useful to future Fab Academy students.

Grant #2

The second grant was from the Icelandic Student Innovation Fund. I got funds to employ a university student for the summer to develop an interface for the robot in the Robot Operating System (ROS). That student is Guðjón Bergmann, a friend from engineering school. Many of his buddies at TU Delft are looking into ROS, so this project will be good for him. Fortunately I've managed to build the arm just in time for his summer project to start.

Dissemination plan

I've thought a lot about how to make my robot arm. But I haven't thought much about how to make sure that it reaches its intended user group. Who is its intended user? Someone like me who is interested in robotics, I guess? High school and university students, engineers, technology enthusiasts, computer science majors who want to program physical things and make them move? Who are they and where do they hang out online?

How do I reach these people? I don't know. That's the part I'm not very good at. Do I set up a website? I guess I could let people in the Fab Lab community know about the project and see if anyone wants to buy an arm to use in their classes. But this is quite a tricky board to mill. And I could show the robot in the SimpleFOC community, except there everybody wants to build their own robot in their own style from scratch. I have a vague dream of asking Seeed Studio if they would be interested in selling populated boards in their online store as an easy way to get into robotics. I don't know.

Maybe if the project gets featured in an article on Hackaday. Yes, that might be the right audience.

Presentation files

I made a final project presentation slide and video under Presentation.