Invention, Intellectual Property and Business Models
Create and document a license for your final project. Develop a plan for dissemination of your final project. Prepare a summary slide (presentation.png, 1280x1024) and video clip (presentation.mp4, 1080p HTML5, < ~minute, < ~10 MB) in your root directory.
[UPDATE: The links above are to the final versions of the slide and video. First drafts are below.]
Learning outcomes:
Have you:
- Summarized two kinds of licenses and explained why you chose one.
- Imagined and outlined possibilities and described how to make them probabilities.
Available Copyright Licenses
At the start of the course, I spoke with a friend who directed me toward a very closed copyright for my work. I know that not allowing derivative works or sharing every detail of the code/ models/ circuit design is counter to the Fab academy model. However, I think that it could be a well-advised position for me, at least for a time. I intend to open up the copyrights to be more open as I either: have a product I have already brought to market or have lost interest in the project. This may not be the most noble of choices. However, if I ever want this project to be something commercial: I may want those protections later. Furthermore, it would be more difficult to ask for protections after they had not been present. This led me to consider two different kinds of copyrights that are well defined by the Creative Commons:
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.
This license is essentially very open and seems to not restrict use of the content whatsoever. The MIT license does insulate the copyright holder from any responsibiliy for damages incurred by a user, since it is clearly an 'as is' license.
I eventually chose the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International copyright license because it asked for the most restrictions under the authoritative weight of the Creative Commons network. I certainly do intend to open up the copyright on this project in the future. It does seem that the business plan for producing such a thing would rely in the service and ease of use rather than in the product itself. Perhaps I could actually sell the online service that would manage data flows, but that is still to be seen. In the future, I could develop this project further by making the hopper proportions specific to different medication types and sizes as well as develop the internal monitoring of the device and sensing systems further. Perhaps a color sensor could serve well as a way to monitor for medications in the queue.
Presentation Slide Example
I used Microsoft PowerPoint as the software to develop my presentation slide. It had all the ease of using PowerPoint, which I am very familiar with from teaching, and only a slight modification of its use. A quick search through the software's options and the web made it clear that I could not easily define the side size directly by the pixel height and width (as expected in this week’s assignment) so instead I found the assumed pixel density of PowerPoint to be 96dpi. This meant that I only needed to take the ideal pixel dimensions and divide them by 96. Some simple division to come up with the corresponding lengths I needed as slide parameters. This worked beautifully, but I would have to wait to find out until I actually saved the document. Saving was not difficult, I saved the presentation, as one always might. Then I saved it again, and just selected the png file type. PowerPoint asked if I wanted the current or all slides saved as png files, and I just selected current, although it was just a one-slide presentation…
After saving, I ensured that the desired dimensions were correct by right-clicking on the image file and sifting through the properties. It worked! My guess is that PowerPoint was gracious in the needed rounding because 1280x1024 is a common screen size.
The last thing of note is about the content of my slide. The background is a stock PowerPoint design, and the font fits the design theme. The pills depicted are clipart that is open and free from the online clipart library. The last element: the diagram of what I intend to build is a little more sophisticated. I originally drew that image in pen, back in January. It was drawn on a piece of paper, scanned and then reduced for the web. Initially, I could only find the web version, so I downloaded it and placed it in the presentation. It didn’t look good. So I started Gimp, selected the white background by color, and deleted it. This left the background as a transparent surface, which looked much nicer. I exported this new version from Gimp and included it in the slide, but it still didn’t look good. The compression from the original image meant the drawing I had done became pixelated. So I decided to dig around until I found the original image. Then I removed the background again in Gimp and included that file. This looked much cleaner and is now the final version of this example slide. I will obviously update this as I make more progress on my final project.
Video sample
Windows 10 does not have a native video editing software. I was appalled. Previous versions had all had Movie Maker, which was a simple but effective tool for making the most absolutely atrocious family movies. I wonder, how will future generations stumble upon this pass-time? Instead, I did a bit of searching and found this article, which explained a few free options for video editing. Although the thought of editing video in Blender sounds engaging, I decided to go with Lightworks. Previous experiences with Blender had taught me that the user interface was not always the most welcoming. I would soon find out that Lightworks was only a little better.
Lightworks was an easy install and the software is free for a year (under a limited version). [UPDATE: When I went to use Lightworks two weeks later, for the final presentation, it told me my license had expired.] This would be enough for my needs. I then just took a few clips that I had from previous work in Fab Academy and edited them together. This required learning the mechanics for trimming clips and arranging them on a timeline. I assume all of these techniques are software-specific in their interface controls, but common in their functionality. Adding titles was a bit more intensive, because of the sheer volume of options. Certainly, this software is more powerful than the old Windows Movie Maker, because of the amount of control that it offers. Lightworks has been used to edit professional films.
I also tried to add a music track to the video, but have not yet succeeded. I downloaded Vivaldi’s Concerto in C Minor from musopen.org. Musopen.org is a delightful open music website, intended for supporting education in classical music. The file plays nicely on my computer, and the music is a beautiful as ever. However, I struggled to integrate the sound into my video (because of the lightworks interface). Audio, in general, is more difficult to manipulate than expected in Lightworks. More exploration of this area will be needed. The video above has a jazz track that was added overtop of the incredibly low-level audio, but this was done within YouTube.
Finally, exporting the project was a breeze. One only needs to right-click on the preview and select from a range of options. There are many things the Lightworks software does nicely, and the exporting process is among them. I look forward to making my actual summary video and using this software again.