This week's lecture covered invention, intellectual property, and income, looking at how ideas turn into protected, shareable, or monetised work. We went through patents and how involved they actually are to file, search, and defend, then copyrights, which turned out to be a much lighter lift since they're secured the moment something is created rather than needing a formal application. We also touched on licensing models like MIT, GPL, and Creative Commons, and the different ways a project can actually generate income, from products and services to platforms and licensing.
Below is my own dissemination plan and progress tracker for the final project, applying what we covered to HoloFan.
HoloFan is going fully open source. The whole point of building it through Fab Academy was to prove that a live, camera-driven holographic POV display didn't need to stay locked inside a commercial product's proprietary firmware, so it only makes sense to put everything back out into the world the same way it was built: in the open.
That means the PCB design files from EasyEDA, the three firmware programs (the blade display code, the base encoder and camera code, and the motor control code), the HoloFan Studio web app, and the 3D print files for the blade and mounts will all be published together as a single repository, with documentation that walks through the build the way it actually happened, including the parts that didn't work the first time. A project like this is genuinely useless to someone else if the documentation only shows the polished result. The dead ends, the rewiring, the moments where the WebSocket refused to connect because of a phone hotspot isolating its own clients, all of that is exactly what saves the next person days of confusion, so it stays in.
The license will be something permissive, most likely MIT for the code and a Creative Commons license for the hardware design files, since the goal is for people to actually build, modify, and improve on this without friction. No restrictions on commercial use either. If someone wants to build a better version and sell it, that is a good outcome, not a problem to be protected against.
Beyond the repository itself, the plan is to put together a short build log style writeup similar to what's already been done for the Fab Academy documentation, and share it somewhere a wider hobbyist or maker audience would actually see it, rather than leaving it buried only on the academic site. The live camera streaming to a spinning display piece in particular seems like the part most likely to be useful to other people working on POV projects, since most existing references stop at looping pre-rendered animations.
The core output device is built and working. There is a real, physical spinning display with a custom PCB on board, and it successfully renders an image in mid air. That part of the project, proving a live holographic display is achievable on this hardware, is done.
What remains is stabilising the image so it holds completely still rather than drifting. Right now the image is locked into place using manually tuned RPM "sweet spots," which works but isn't a permanent solution. Getting a sensor properly synced into the loop, so the timing locks automatically instead of needing to be hand tuned every time, is the main task left.
The image itself is working well. It displays clearly, it's recognisable, and seeing it actually float there in the air the first time was honestly one of the best moments of this whole build.
What's not fully resolved is the physical balance of the blade. There are still wires hanging slightly loose on the spinning side, which throws off the balance a bit at higher RPM. It's a solvable problem, mostly a matter of tidying and securing the wiring rather than anything fundamentally wrong with the design.
The technical questions are mostly answered at this point. What's left is more about purpose and direction. Where does something like this actually belong? Is it a piece for installations and exhibitions, a tool for events, something closer to signage, or is it really just a proof of concept that's interesting on its own merits? Who actually needs a display like this, beyond the novelty of it? Those are the questions worth sitting with now that the hard engineering problem has been solved.
The immediate next step is finishing the sensor integration to lock the image stability, since that's the one piece of unfinished engineering left. After that, the focus shifts to cleaning up the wiring and balance issue on the blade, then putting together the full documentation and repository for the open source release.
The biggest thing I'm taking away from this is that there is always a solution. No problem is unsolvable if you're willing to actually engineer your way through it. There were so many points in this build where something just didn't work, the WiFi wouldn't connect, the ESC wouldn't arm, the image came out as a meaningless spinning blur, and every single time the answer was just to keep working at it rather than assume it was a dead end.
There were a lot of late nights on this, a lot of nights where nothing went right at all, but persisting through that is what actually got this from an idea to something real and working. It really does just take time and effort. Nothing about this was impossible, it just required not giving up when it got difficult.