Weekly Assignments Final Project About me

18. Invention, Intellectual Property and Business Models

The assignment for the week:

  • 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 website's root directory.

    Go to:
    1. Dissemination Plan
    2. Draft for video and slide

    Dissemination Plan

    The Final Project

    My Final Project is a reaction time board. The background of the idea you can read from my Final Project page.

    The idea is to test out your overall reaction time. The game will be used at KBT gym by kickboxers. You could observe what happens to your reaction time after a hard training session, or in weeks or months of time.

    The Dissemination Plan

    My final project is at the first stage of this reaction time board. I wanted to make it as simple as possible at this point, for being able to complete it during the last weeks. I have many ideas on how to improve or change it in the future when I have more time.

    I am ok with people using my design, but I want to note on the final project page that if you use my instructions, design or code, it is at your own risk. Otherwise I am happy if anyone can use it for their own purposes.

    The license for my purposes is Creative Commons. I looked through the options here. I chose the:
    CC BY-NC: This license allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator.
    BY – Credit must be given to the creator NC – Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted.

    For the software I would use The MIT License. It is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It applies for software and is free of charge and without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software. It has the sentence I wanted: 'THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND'.
    You can read it fully from here.

    The future plans

    If I get this to work properly, I believe I would be very interested to develop it in the future and make it have different kind of functions.

  • It needs first of all a thicker, sturdier board that can be done by milling.
  • Then the functioning of the nodes needs to be secured, do that even if someone accidentally hits the LED ring it wouldn't break easily. Right now the casings are quite hard, but the sensor in the middle moves easily if the casing is hit. The casing has a 1 cm hole in it for the sensor. The sensor itself is smaller, but not much. Therefore, only under mm movement affects the sensing. One way would be also to make the hole bigger, even though that doesn't look so good.
  • It needs more programming. I would like it to have memory for top scores, and a way to present them.
  • I am also considering, instead of OLED screen, a bigger LED matrix screen.

    When my project is developed further, in some point I will take it to the gym and we can start using and testing it. I can also make some modifications then if needed. When I am happy about the final result, I would be happy to spread some information about it. That could happen for example by showing it when we have competitions in the gym. At those times there are many people there around Finland, and coaches also. The KBT has also very nice social media appearance, so it is easy to spread information there.

    In that case I have to think about the possibilities I have with the product. It does cost something to make this, so I can't basically do it for free for others. I can share my work and design, and help others make it. Or I can find a way to cover the costs. I haven't thought about commercializing it, that would need a lot more things resolved. But never say never..

    I like the idea of others using my work for non-commercial purposes. So I do want to protect also future work in that manner. Maybe I could also plan a package or a workshop to teach others how to make somekind of a simple/small version of this game.

    I wanted to check some of the existing products out there.

    There's Blazepod; a smart reaction training platform with app. It has LED pods with bluetooth and battery, and smartphone pairing. Reflex training activities. Collect data and get insight on how to optimize your training to boost performance.
    The simplest set, set of 4 pods cost 408.89e, and advanced features with 14,99e/month.
    Blazepod website.

    Then there's Batak, a reaction time test using a Batak light board, in which the participant has to strike randomly lit buttons in the shortest possible time. Purpose: to measure a person's ability to see, process and react to visual information quickly. They sell and hire the equipment, no pricing mentioned.
    Batak website.

    These were kind of expensive, so there might be a need for cheaper product at least in hobby use!

    Draft for video and slide

    I updated my documenting when I already had the final versions of the video and the slide. Here they are!

    The slide