Need some open source advice

My son and I have developed a three color printer which incorporates a special extruder. We plan to license it as complete open source. Free for anyone to use, copy, or do whatever they want with it. Even though the prototype works very good, we want to develop it further before we release it. But we need some funds to be able to do that. Would using a "Kickstarter" plan be appropiate for that? And if not, what are our options? We don't plan on making any money from this, all we want is credit for inventing it, and a few for our personal use. I'm a retired engineer and my son is in Veteninary medical school. We both have gained a lot from the open source community and this would be our way of paying it back. We are looking forward to the forums advice.

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T.S. Elliot wrote: "Between the idea and the reality, falls the shadow..." It's in that shadow world great discoveries are made.

Hi Radioman, welcome to the forum! You might consider using a bounty to raise some funds. Bounties are used quite a bit by open source software developers (see for example the Wikipedia article on open source bounties). We have been trying to get people interested in using bounties for open source hardware projects here on the forum, but there has not been a lot of activity yet.

If you want to learn more about how to set up an open source bounty for a hardware project, please see the sticky post at the top of the General forum titled RepRap Bounties and also the Bounties subforum.

One problem you may have is that Stratasys have already patented a colour printing system.

It is probably a good idea for you to check their patent and see if your design is in conflict with it.

EVEN IF IT IS... it still could be that you could work around to avoid their patent wording to provide an open source solution.

And yes, Kickstarter would be a great place to crowd fund for sourcing.

There has been A LOT of interest on the FB group re 2, 3 and 5 colour mixing. Technically you only need 4 (cyan, magenta, yellow and black, + white base filament).

There are as yet no open source solutions for this, so it could be a way up for you.

Crowdsourcing would give you funds to develop with. But do your research first. If you want some help, shout out that you need help with google searches and stuff like that.

Interesting factoid - Stratasys DO NOT OWN THE TRADEMARK "Polyjet".

[tmsearch.uspto.gov]

Thanks MattMoses and Pat Mcd for the advice. We have spent a lot of time looking at patent searches and can find nothing like our unit. We also are investigating Bounties. However when we do get funding we plan on using the bounty system with some of our funding for Firmware work. We have a lot of research ahead of us, but feel the endgoal is well worth it.

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T.S. Elliot wrote: "Between the idea and the reality, falls the shadow..." It's in that shadow world great discoveries are made.