Weekly Assignments Final Project About me

Week 19 Invention, Intellectual Property, and Income

For our last official week of class, we were charged with the following assignment

Develop a plan for dissemination of your final project

Complete your final project, tracking your progress:

Logo

Develop a plan for dissemination of your final project

My plan for dissemination is display the physical piece in a space dedicated to works completed in my department- tentatively titled the Mezzanine Exhibition space. The audiences I have in mind are Neil Gershenfeld and the Fab Academy instructors, first, future Fab Academy students, second, and my students, third. In particular, I want my students to understand the process that I went through and be able to understand how physical, electronic and embedded programming intersect. The digital footprint of my project- the documentation pages- are for fab academy instructors, current and future fabacademy students, in order to demonstrate my process and the skills I've learned during this class. As this will also be used in my classes as an example of interaction design, I have relied on the department for some resources that can be repurposed- such as the neopixel strips, 4040 t-slot, and acrylic. There is no business plan nor need to scale up.

I chose a CC BY Creative Commons license for my project. The project by itself is not really patentable, and the name, PXL, is not something that I can trademark. I referred to the six different types of creative commons license listed on this page, “Sharing Openly, Sharing Globally.” Creative Commons, n.d. Accessed June 2, 2026. https://creativecommons.org/cc-licenses/ and determined that the CC BY made the most sense.

The text I will include on my project will be:

You are free to:
Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially.
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.
Under the following terms:
Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
Notices:
You do not have to comply with the license for elements of the material in the public domain or where your use is permitted by an applicable exception or limitation.

No warranties are given. The license may not give you all of the permissions necessary for your intended use. For example, other rights such as publicity, privacy, or moral rights may limit how you use the material.

Before it could be readily used, most importantly I would need to make the power safer as the total possible current that the Neopixels can pull is 57 amps. In addition, I have to make the project more modular to make it easier to assemble/disassemble and more user-friendly, where users could go easily turn it on or off or change the volume.

I have built the design to accommodate some of these revisions, such as power on off and the inclusion of sound, but only in future spirals.


Tasks completed

This week I put in a lot of time in the lab working on the project (Wednesday through Monday). My first child is graduating from high school this week, so I am trying to complete everything before the ceremony, party, and family come in.

The tasks I have completed include:

I am experimenting with this process here on an earlier prototype.

Wire mgmt

The wire mgmt for the project on the macro level worked really well. The wire management in the enclosure was not as effective as needed. Don't use permanent means of fixing anything in projects- even when you think that they are finished. It is just a really bad idea- it makes repairing or replacing components inordinately difficult and does't really allow for iterative improvement.


Tasks undone

The tasks I have left to complete include:

Spiral tasks

what's working? what's not?

I have six sets of animation for six movement states that the TOF sensor is to detect.

Overall, I am happy with the animation sequences, which respond fairly well to the TOF sensor, however there is still some issues discerning between approaching/withdrawing (y axis movement) and walking past (x axis movement) and movement that tracks on both x and y axes.

Wire management and the enclosure- functions for the sake of the final project, but the design is unwieldy to use and means once it is on, it is on. That was not a great idea (see my comments earlier).


what questions need to be resolved?

What will happen when?

Week 19 Files

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