Skip to content

18. Invention, Intellectual property & Income

This week I continued work on my Final Project, the Assistive Aquaponics Fish Tank, while also preparing a dissemination plan for my work, along with some drafts of the project’s presentation slide and video. (May 26)

7-8 minutes

Dissemination Plan

I went into this week’s class with a pretty good idea on my desired dissemination plan for my Final Project, the Assistive Aquaponics Fish Tank. Keeping in the theme of many of the tools used to create my Assistive Aquaponics Fish Tank, I plan on keeping the design open-source. I spent a little bit of time on the Creative Commons website trying to pin down what my definition of “open source” really was for this project, and found the Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Copyright License, a great fit for my project.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

This copyright embodies all of my likes of keeping open-source projects, allowing anyone to share, copy, redistribute, remix, transform, and build upon my project, and leaving the project expandable in the community. This copyright, as opposed to a patent or something of the sort, allows for this adaptation and development, a door that, in my opinion, should never be closed (to avoid instances like the current bottleneck of available 3d printer technologies). Despite all this, this Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Copyright, as the name suggests, requires appropriate credit to be given to my Assistive Aquaponics Fish Tank project, and keeps the material from being used for commercial purposes. The balance of the openness of this dissemination plan, along with the due accreditation is a great fit for my project and made for a pretty easy dissemination choice

The Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Copyright License covers the entirety of my creative work on my Assistive Aquaponics Fish Tank and is a perfectly suitable choice, that I will be going with for the dissemination of my project. In addition to this license, however, the FAB copyright license caught my eye during this week’s lecture. This license isn’t a larger protection copyright like the Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Copyright License, however, it gives me a short copyright claim to include at the start of my creative software pieces, as well as in a README file when my files are downloaded. Although my Final Project itself will be copyrighted under the Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Copyright License, this FAB license (included below) is another nice addition in the use cases just mentioned.

(c) Teddy Warner - (Date Published)

This work may be reproduced, modified, distributed, performed, and displayed for any purpose,
but must acknowledge the Assistive Aquaponics Fish Tank. 
Copyright is retained and must be preserved. The work is provided as is; 
no warranty is provided, and users accept all liability.

Presentation Drafts

Draft Slide

Following the creation of my dissemination plan for my Final Project, I began work on a draft of my Assistive Aquaponics Fish Tank presentation slide. I began this process in Pixlr, an online 2D CAD software I used in part of my week 2 computer-aided design assignment. I created an account on the platform, giving me access to a whole range of new functions in the interface, one of which being the ability to work off of parts of templates. I began the work on this slide with one of these templates, by first expanding the size to 1080p to fit with the presentation slides requirements. This expansion called for the alteration of the background of my slide to fit with the new pixel size. From here, I added in my project name as a title, along with my name as the author, my TW logo, a QR code linked to my Assistive Aquaponics Fish Tank documentation site, and my project’s copyright. From here I began the process of filling the slide. A note to keep in mind is at the time of working on this first draft, the project is not yet completed, and all images included in this step are just placeholders with my work on the project thus far. This main portion of the slide will include a large shot of the completed project on the left, along with an Electronics, Laser Cutting, CNC Milling, System Integration, and 3D Printing section on the right, with notes on aspects on the project that fall under those categories. As a final touch, I again modified another section of a Pixlr template and included a mask with our Charlotte Latin Fab Lab logo towards the upper left-hand corner of the slide.


Most Updated Assistive Aquaponics Fish Tank Slide in Repository

Video Planning

Next up was the drafting of my final project video, roughly a minute-long showcase of my Assistive Aquaponics Fish Tank. Conveniently enough a couple of weeks before this week’s assignment, content creator from New York’s Fat Cat Fab Lab, Zack Freedman, put out a video on making project videos that “don’t suck”.

I watched this video when it was first released purely out of my interest in Mr. Freedman’s works, and as the main take away got the piece of advice that projects are only cool to the engineer. As mentioned in the video, nobody besides an engineer cares about the 7 hours spend routing traces on a board, or other such tedious challenging tasks. Instead, the recommendation was made to remove anything static from project videos, even when aimed at engineers who appreciate the work behind them. If a project video is filled with motion, human interaction, and progressing development, it will be interesting to watch, no matter the view. At the start of my video drafting work this week, I gave this video another watch, this time jotting down some notes (included below), along with a basic plan for how I would lay the video out.

Working from this flattened-out plan, I drafting my fianl project video, that when published, can be found on my Final Project page.I began by laying out the times designated for each shot, as well as the content of that shot, to keep my final video at a good pace, while covering all of the highlights of my project. I also took some time to pick out a nice royalty-free background track for my video, credited below…

Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/sensho/pina-colada
License code: ECXXJ3K3VBAPOBBL

… and finally also recorded the first opening shot of my video, the flipping of my tank’s power switch (the rest will have to wait until after the project’s completion.)


Three Point Lighting Setup For Power Switch Intro Recording


Last update: June 8, 2021