Íñigo Gutiérrez Febles
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Week 18

Invention, Intellectual Property and Income.

completed

overview.

This week is about how the 3m module leaves the lab: who it could be useful to, how I share it, under which license, and where things stand now that the defense is done.

The final project is the 3m: minimalist-mono-module, a single telescopic elevation module. It works: it raises and retracts under its own drive train. The full four-leg desk it points to is the product vision, not this deliverable — that comes in later iterations.

learning objectives.

  • Develop a plan to share the work and raise awareness of it.
  • Choose a license that matches my openness philosophy and justify it.
  • Outline realistic future opportunities for the project.
  • Track the final-project status now that it has been presented.

assignment.

  • Develop a dissemination plan for the final project.
  • Complete the final project and track progress.

dissemination plan.

who is it for.

  • Makers who want a real mechatronic elevation mechanism, not just a desk-frame kit.
  • People with a privacy-first, open-source mindset who don’t want a cloud-locked commercial desk.
  • Future me / future iterations: the mono-module is the seed of a multi-leg desk.

how I share it.

Honest and small-scale, on purpose:

  • Site documentation — the full build lives here: BOM, CAD, KiCad files, firmware, assembly steps. This is the main channel.
  • The video — I share the presentation video with friends and anyone curious.
  • In person — if someone visits, I show the module working physically. No formal workshop or campaign; that is not the point of this project.

intellectual property and licensing.

My orientation: fully open, attribution only. Anyone may use, modify, build on, and even sell it — the only condition is crediting the original author and linking back to the source.

A single project mixes documentation, code and hardware, which need different tools, so the intent maps to three licenses:

LayerWhat it coversLicenseWhat it requires
Documentation + CAD/designthis site, Fusion files, drawingsCC BY 4.0attribution only
Firmware / softwareXIAO RP2040 source codeMITkeep copyright + license notice
Hardware designthe physical module itselfCERN-OHL-P 2.0attribution, permissive (no copyleft)

CERN-OHL-P 2.0 is the Permissive variant of the CERN Open Hardware Licence — the hardware equivalent of MIT: use, modify, manufacture and distribute freely, just keep the notices. I deliberately avoided the reciprocal CERN variants (-W / -S) and the common CC BY-NC-SA for the same reason: NonCommercial and ShareAlike add restrictions I do not want.

Attribution mark used on the final-project page and in the presentation:

3m: minimalist-mono-module © 2026 by Íñigo Gutiérrez Febles is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Plain-text version for the video and slide credits:

3m: minimalist-mono-module © 2026 by Íñigo Gutiérrez Febles is licensed under CC BY 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

income and future development.

For now this is learning and personal use only — no business plan, no income.

Looking ahead, I see it becoming a proper open-hardware / open-software project with a mixed model:

  • DIY profile — everything is documented and downloadable; you build it yourself, free, under the licenses above.
  • Done-for-you profile — for users who just want it working, the same design becomes a finished product they can buy.

The technical path there runs through the next iterations: moving from one mono-module to a multi-leg desk, where the real challenge is coordinating several legs in sync.

final project status.

The 3m module was presented and defended. Tracking, now that the milestone is past:

what is done.

  • 3m module built and defended; the mono-module elevates and retracts under its own drive train (T8x8 leadscrew, NEMA 17, TMC2209, FastAccelStepper with soft position limits).
  • PETG concentric cylinders printed full length (360 mm) with radial anti-rotation ribs at 120 degrees.
  • Custom milled control PCB (XIAO RP2040 + TMC2209 + LM2940) and two TTP223 capacitive touch controls.
  • Presentation video and slides produced.

what is next (future iterations).

  • Move from a single module to a multi-leg desk — coordinating motion across legs.
  • Mechanical refinements identified during the build (e.g. internal shoulder for the nut block).

what is working / what is not.

  • Working: the elevation mechanism, the anti-rotation ribs, the touch control, the position limits.
  • Open question: how the single-module logic scales to several synchronized legs.

what I learned.

See reflections below.

reflections.

The legal side of making — licenses, patents, the whole thicket of legalese — is complex and not especially inviting; I doubt it attracts many makers or maker-wannabes, myself included. But choosing a license forced me to actually decide what I want, and what I want turned out to be simple and generous: if someone can take my documentation, get inspired, and build their own thing from it, that is a beautiful and inspiring outcome. Picking plain attribution (CC BY) over the more common CC BY-NC-SA was a deliberate choice to keep that door fully open instead of half-closing it with NonCommercial and ShareAlike clauses I did not actually believe in.

The lesson: pick the license that matches what you genuinely want to allow, not the one everyone defaults to.

design files.

The content of this page was originally drafted in Spanish and translated and stylistically edited into English with the assistance of AI (Claude, Anthropic). All technical work, decisions, and documentation structure are my own.