19. Invention, Intellectual Property and Income

This week is about the business of creating a product. Planning the steps that come after you've made the thing can be just as important as getting it to work.

Create a dissemination plan for your final project

The plan for Magic 8 is to test it with the homeschool students and campers at Moonlighter FabLab in Miami Beach. As a non-profit that works with the City of Miami Beach, we work with elementary school children in our educational programs. Funding for this kind of product can be related to some of our grants. As our demand grows, we can use funding from paid workshops and product sales to offset the cost of production. This is not intended to be a large scale production because we want to encourage curiosity within our STEAM community. We will also include Magic 8 in our annual Maker Faire Miami and Education Day. This would be a great opportunity to share it with a wider population of public school students in Miami-Dade and Broward County, Florida.

Outline future possibilities and described how to make them probabilities

As the project develops further, I can be included as a STEAM kit for more of the classes taught at Moonlighter. The next stage would be to market it to other STEAM programs in South Florida and to parents interested in interactive games for their families.

What tasks have been completed and what tasks remain?

The physical project has been completed. I am still working on the coding for the firmware and webapp to ensure everything works properly.

What's working? What's not?

The individual LEDs are turning on, the webapp is able to connect to the microcontroller via the websocket and hostname, the LED matrix is receiving messages from the webapp. The current issue is getting the switch inputs to work and for the individual LEDs to respond as commanded.

What questions need to be resolved?

If I try a different programming language, will the issues be resolved? Do I need a second microcontroller? to accommodate all of my intended functions? How can I make the device smaller and more robust?

Planned what will happen when?

Magic 8 will be introduced to Moonlight FabLab's camper this Summer during our Summer Maker Camp. Maker Faire Miami 2027 will be the best time to launch it more publicly in the Spring. It can them be introduced to more school Fall 2027 and be open for public purchase in time for the 2027 Holiday season.

What have you learned?

I have learned a lot about the processes of producing a product. Going beyond the basics of digital fabrication, I learned the ways these tools can be used to consistently and reliably produce high quality work. I also learned the value of coding and understanding hardware and how hardware and software interact.

Licensing

This project is released under a strongly-reciprocal, open-source license bundle:

Hardware (game board + PCB): CERN-OHL-S v2

Firmware & webapp: GPL v3

Documentation & media (Fab page, in-app messages, graphics): CC BY-SA 4.0

Claude Session

Why this choice

I chose strong copyleft across every layer of the project so that the customizable-games ecosystem stays open. Anyone who builds on the board, the firmware, or the documentation is required to release their version under the same terms. No one can take this teaching tool, improve it, and lock it behind a closed or proprietary product. Selling units is fully permitted, which matters since this will be distributed through Moonlighter FabLab and potentially other organizations. This bundle also matches Fab Academy's own default license (CC BY-SA), keeping the project consistent with the open-education community it comes from. The trade-off is that a company can't absorb the design into a closed commercial product without also open-sourcing their changes. For an educational tool built to be shared and remixed by kids and educators, that's the intended outcome rather than a limitation.

Footer license notice

© Jadayne A. Smith, 2026. Hardware licensed under CERN-OHL-S v2. Firmware and webapp licensed under GNU GPL v3.0. Documentation and media licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Full license texts and source files available at [your repo link].

This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by CERN, the Free Software Foundation, or Creative Commons.