Week 18: Invention, Intellectual Property and Income

Table of Contents

This week, again, was meant to continue working on our final project. As a small assignment, we had to choose a license for our project and think about our future plans with it.

This week’s track.

This Week’s Tasks

Develop a plan for dissemination of your final project.

The License

This project by Jakob Lerch is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Dissemination Plan

A dissemination plan is a roadmap for how to raise awareness for my final project, given that I wanted to do that.

Who is your project for?
- The target group I had in mind were mainly (hobby) musicians and light operators, and digital (performance) artists. However other people could use that as well, after all it is a MIDI controller.
How is it funded?
- As of now, the project is funded though personal budget of mine and that of the FabLab.
Is there a business plan?
- Not at this time.
How would you scale up the fabrication process? (This question I thought about myself. It is not really necessary if I choose not to sell the product directly, but, say, the knowledge of how to build it.)
- For the first spiral of scaling, I would consider the following things.
  - Setting up a printer farm of only a few printers for producing the product multiple times. There is software, like Octoprint for coordinating such a setup. I would omit the step of smoothing the surface of the printed parts, but that is okay for this iteration.
  - PCBs could be ordered from board houses in large quantity.
  - For fabricating the PCB, one could set up one or multiple pick and place machines. There are open-source and open-hardware solutions for that (see OpenPnP). Components then could be soldered using soldering ovens. The only process left to automate would be applying the soldering paste. For that, one could cut stencils using a laser cutter plus some machine to distribute the paste through the stencil. I do not know of any such machine, but very probably there are some. If not, the machine could be constructed and built in-house, as it would only require as it would only require one axis for moving a very large spatula.
  - A laser cutter would be used for cutting the soldering stencils as well as the fabric of the glove.
  - I would do some more research for industry-ready CNC embroidery and sewing machines. As of now, I think sewing the fabric parts could be a bottleneck.
  - Assembly would be done by hand for the first iteration.
- For improving the pipeline, I would research more about injection molding for producing the rigid parts.
How would you fund scaling up?
- I would apply for apply for start-up funding grants, like the ones offered by the start-up incubator service connected to our FabLab.
Why did you choose this license?
- I chose the license above to make the product as open and accessible as possible. To commercialize it, I would need to put in a lot of effort, plus for anybody who can code, it would not be difficult to copy the designs. Therefore, if I wanted to commercialize the product itself (which is not even given as of now) I would rather improve it and commercialize the full version.

Future Possibilities & How to Make Them Probable

I will definitely share the project plans to friends and artists to build it and have their performances with it. It is a nice and accessible alternative to similar commercial & closed-source products. I also might improve the project later on. Furthermore, I like the notion of sharing knowledge about how to build things as a business model instead of selling the finished product. I could imagine hosting workshops on how to do CAD, coding, etc. to develop and customize that product your own.

Reflections

This week’s assignment made me think of how to scale up the fabrication process of a product. I am happy about how easy it was for me to assemble such a plan using the knowledge from the Fab Academy. It would not have been so easy before. However, I still think that I have a lot to learn about large-scale fabrication.

Use of Language Models

During writing this report, I used ChatGPT (GPT 4) for finding out about what license to choose. The conversations can be found here and here.