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Week-19 Invention, intellectual property and income

Week-19 Invention, intellectual property and income

This is my 19th week at FabAcademy, this has been a very interesting week for my, as we were learning about invention and intellectual property. As a researcher these are topics close to me in my everyday, however, still I learnt a lot. The assignment of the week was:

  • Develop a plan for dissemination of your final project
  • Complete your final project, tracking your progress: what tasks have been completed, and what tasks remain? what’s working? what’s not? what questions need to be resolved? what will happen when? what have you learned?

Dissemination and development plan of what I have experienced

Even though I work as a timber engineer and scientist related to the construction sector, my final project it is being something very new to me, because I usually have fully worked in the structural engineering field, without caring about sensoring/electronics, digital/robotic design and fabrication or fassade elements. However, my development at FabAcademy has demonstrated to me that this field has indeed a lot of potential for creating new solutions for the building sector. Being realistic, however, I believe that I need more experience and improving my project much more before reaching the market. Normally I do not have enough time for self-developing projects with my hands, however I usually teach grad and postgraduate students (currently I am supervising 5 PhD students), therefore, my plan is first, installing digital design and fabrication as one of the core working expertise of my research group. Therefore, the smartest stragety for further developing this skill consists of the following steps:

STEP1: Disseminating digital fabrication with pre-, but specially post-grad students. I will prepare presentations and workshops of all learnt in the course. The preparation of all this material and courses will be facilitated by the fact that one of my PhD students enrolled with me in the FabAcademy (Francisco Ruz).

STEP2: Research project applications. I plan to develop several research project applications to the Spanish and European funding agencies. These projects will offer the possibility to still developing the ideas, and particular the project mockup that I have being developing at the FabAcademy.

STEP3: Apart from my work at the university, I use to work with companies, and in particular with one company related to industrialized timber construction. Therefore, I have the chance to easily transfer the created solution to the market. Therefore, when the solution reaches the required level of maturity my idea is generating a workshop explaining the solution and apply it to a specific project. According to my experience, this is the best way to achieve dissemination in the construction market. Once a pioneering project is built, comes the real dissemination to the market.

STEP4: Once a case study is built, my idea is disseminating this to the market by participating in specializes industrial fairs of the construction sector, such as REBUILD https://www.rebuildexpo.com/, CONSTRUMAT https://www.construmat.com/ or others.

Final project tracking

  • What I have completed: PCB design and fabrication, wooden parts design and fabrication, metacrylate parts design and fabrication, PLA parts design and fabrication, electronics soldering except OLED, part of the programming in Arduino IDE, in particular sensoring of temperature and movement of the servos accordingly.

  • What I still need to do: integration of all electronics in the PLA printed parts. Including OLED and finalizing Arduino programming.

  • What has worked and what not: the most critical part was the opening/closing of gates by servos and that has worked. Also, in general all the fabrication of parts has worked properly as expected. The only thing that has not worked has been the energy supply of servos via external battery, the reason whas that the bateries I bought (and the corresponding solar cell and stepper) were not able to provide all the current intensity needed. I measured the current consumed by the system with the power supply of my lab and measured 0.24 A with the two servos working, which was not possible to supply even using two batteries in parallel of 3.7 V. Therefore, I resorted to USB energy supply which works properly. In future developments of the project, I still plan to implement the solar energy suply, but for that I need to first study better the intensity required in real world applications.

Video and Slide Drafts

Here you can see the draft video of my final project:

And here the draft slide presenting my project: