ThermalRunaway
New Member
Hello everyone,
To start I'll just quickly introduce myself because I'm new here. My name's Brian Hoskins, I'm 25 and I'm an Electronics Technician which I've been for 7 years (basically since I left school). I have an interest in Electronics Design at the hobbyist level and often design my own projects for use around the home. I've studied Electronics at various levels and have many qualifications within the electronics field, most of which are digital electronics biased mainly because that's where my main interest lies.
I'm currently in the middle of designing my biggest project yet which, although is mainly for my own personal satisfaction and my own education, I'm trying to design it as if I were a real Electronics engineer working on a real project for a real company - which means I'm doing all the research into Electrical safety, patents, copyright, market issues (who are the market competitors, is the project viable, can it command a market share, can it make money etc etc) and I'm also making sure to properly document all of my research and produce reports on all the relevant issues that I've mentioned above. Normally I would skip all of this boring hassle and just get on with the project, but I'm hoping that the end result in this case will be an extremely polished product with all the proper research and documentation to go with it. Part of the reason I'm doing it is as a personal education project but mainly I thought it'd be great to do a couple of good projects in this manner so that I can take the finished products along to future job interviews so that I can sell myself better - "These are my qualifications, this is what I can do and these are real project prototypes that I've designed and built myself", for example.
Now, part of the research I'm doing is on patents. My project requires some form of wireless communication system in order to send simple commands to a remote device somewhere in the home, and having done some research in this area I quite liked how the X10-protocol worked and felt it would be the ideal solution for my project. The X-10 protocol allows you to transmit and receive simple commands over the domestic mains supply in order to control other devices (switch things on and off etc).
My original idea was to implement this X-10 protocol in my own project and use the command-set for the protocol to suit my own needs, but I became worried that if I did this I would be breaking copyright laws or patents. Obviously this isn't a problem for a home project that I'm only going to use for myself, but as I mentioned earlier I'm trying to design this project as if it were a commercial project that would be manufactured and sold for profit. With this in mind I visited the UK patents office website to see if I could find out which parts of the X-10 protocol, if any, were protected by patents. I proposed to then modify the X-10 protocol such that my version of it no longer broke those patents. Obviously this would mean that my project wouldn't have X-10 compatability, but that isn't an issue for my particular project anyway.
Unfortunately in order to obtain the required information you need to ask the patents office to do a search, and for this luxury they charge you £2500, which obviously is way over the budget of a home hobbyist who only wants to do some research for his own needs!
Since then I have completely modified the entire X-10 protocol so that it works on the same principal but uses a competely different command structure which I've designed specifically to suit my own project and obviously the transmissions will now be completely incompatible with X-10 devices.
My worry is whether this is enough in order to avoid copyright or patent-breaking issues? Are there any Electronics Engineers on this forum who have experience in avoiding patent or copyright issues and do you have any advice to offer me? Do you think I could actually contact the X-10 company themselves and ask them the question directly?
Any advice or web links to information on patents and how they could effect projects like these would be hugely appreciated.
Thanks everyone
Brian
To start I'll just quickly introduce myself because I'm new here. My name's Brian Hoskins, I'm 25 and I'm an Electronics Technician which I've been for 7 years (basically since I left school). I have an interest in Electronics Design at the hobbyist level and often design my own projects for use around the home. I've studied Electronics at various levels and have many qualifications within the electronics field, most of which are digital electronics biased mainly because that's where my main interest lies.
I'm currently in the middle of designing my biggest project yet which, although is mainly for my own personal satisfaction and my own education, I'm trying to design it as if I were a real Electronics engineer working on a real project for a real company - which means I'm doing all the research into Electrical safety, patents, copyright, market issues (who are the market competitors, is the project viable, can it command a market share, can it make money etc etc) and I'm also making sure to properly document all of my research and produce reports on all the relevant issues that I've mentioned above. Normally I would skip all of this boring hassle and just get on with the project, but I'm hoping that the end result in this case will be an extremely polished product with all the proper research and documentation to go with it. Part of the reason I'm doing it is as a personal education project but mainly I thought it'd be great to do a couple of good projects in this manner so that I can take the finished products along to future job interviews so that I can sell myself better - "These are my qualifications, this is what I can do and these are real project prototypes that I've designed and built myself", for example.
Now, part of the research I'm doing is on patents. My project requires some form of wireless communication system in order to send simple commands to a remote device somewhere in the home, and having done some research in this area I quite liked how the X10-protocol worked and felt it would be the ideal solution for my project. The X-10 protocol allows you to transmit and receive simple commands over the domestic mains supply in order to control other devices (switch things on and off etc).
My original idea was to implement this X-10 protocol in my own project and use the command-set for the protocol to suit my own needs, but I became worried that if I did this I would be breaking copyright laws or patents. Obviously this isn't a problem for a home project that I'm only going to use for myself, but as I mentioned earlier I'm trying to design this project as if it were a commercial project that would be manufactured and sold for profit. With this in mind I visited the UK patents office website to see if I could find out which parts of the X-10 protocol, if any, were protected by patents. I proposed to then modify the X-10 protocol such that my version of it no longer broke those patents. Obviously this would mean that my project wouldn't have X-10 compatability, but that isn't an issue for my particular project anyway.
Unfortunately in order to obtain the required information you need to ask the patents office to do a search, and for this luxury they charge you £2500, which obviously is way over the budget of a home hobbyist who only wants to do some research for his own needs!
Since then I have completely modified the entire X-10 protocol so that it works on the same principal but uses a competely different command structure which I've designed specifically to suit my own project and obviously the transmissions will now be completely incompatible with X-10 devices.
My worry is whether this is enough in order to avoid copyright or patent-breaking issues? Are there any Electronics Engineers on this forum who have experience in avoiding patent or copyright issues and do you have any advice to offer me? Do you think I could actually contact the X-10 company themselves and ask them the question directly?
Any advice or web links to information on patents and how they could effect projects like these would be hugely appreciated.
Thanks everyone
Brian