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Week 19 - Invention, Intellectual Property and Income

Individual 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, < ~25 MB) and put them in your website’s root directory

Dissemination

Dissemination is the act of spreading information. In the case of my final project it refers to the how the developed product will be made accessible and usable.

For now, I only plan to make one machine and hand it over to my employer once it runs stable. Hopefully it will proof useful and accurate enough to perform the indirect solar radiation measurments. I'm going to follow up on the performance and reliability and might consider making an updated / improved version with the learnings from the final project.

License

As this machine might be of interest both for scientific institutions and manufacturers I want to protect the design with an appropriate license.

  1. I want to share the design with scientific institutions and non-profit organizations as well as for private use with the restriction of crediting me.

  2. I want to prohibit the commercial use of my design.

Because I wasn't sure where to start, I went to the creative commons page, as this was a familiar name. I found their page quite well structured and discovered the Chooser, which allows you to answer a few quiestions to get a recommendation for a license type.

I got the suggestion for CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, which sounds very reasonable.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

However, as I checked out my GitLab repository, I found that it already has a CC BY 4.0 license applied to it and if I understand it correctly - this cannot be changed, once applied. This license doesn't restrict the commercial use. I don't remember if that was a default setting and if there would have been any chance to change it...

Gitlab license

Now, this is an important learning for my next project: Decide on an appropriate license prior to publishing anything!

I decided to add a copyright notice footer on my homepage using the inbuilt functionality in Mkdoc material.

Copyright

Future plans

If everything goes well and I make an improved version that is reliable, I might consider creating a package with the design files, program and BOM-list and present this development in a publication or at a conference.

Inspiration

I find it quite unlikely, that somebody is going to reproduce the machine in the exact same way. It would very likely need to be adapted to local conditions/availability and manufacturer preference. Nevertheless, it would be great if this could be the inspiration for somebody to improve or adopt the design and make their own version of a sun tracker.

Presentation

I created this page where I post the presentation video and slide.