So, last summer I molded my wearable computer plans into a reality. I now have, kind of, usable wearable computer. That kind of is because it’s still not ready, because I’ve done nothing with it since then. Still need the keyboard, though I’ve found a fellow who has made one and promised to make me one too. Also the display cable or something made a suicide just minutes before I was starting the demo today. I did have pictures with something on it’s screen, but it’s just not the same. Battery system also needs an update, currently it runs on 4 AA batteries quite well.
Today I was demoing the thing and our lab at school, it was a success and my wearable was competing at least equally for attention with a Tuxracer mod that allows you to play it with a snowmobile. And that’s old thing and still the main attraction when we have “open doors day” at our school.
I had a lot of people asking if I have patented the thing or if I invented it first and if I plan to start selling those soon and such things. Answer to all of these is, of course, a strict no. First, I’ve still got (at least) 2,5 years left to graduate (and I’ve already built my ultimate goal, let’s see what I’ll get for my thesis :p), so I’m not going to create a business before that, if at all. I also haven’t and am not able to patent it (though they do get really odd patent all the time), because I’ve not done anything really new anyway. I’m using Beagleboard with Linux (surprise), hacked myvu crystal (Gregor Richards has videos of it in youtube), open source spiffchorder as a keyboard, well I did make my own menu based interface with C, but I seem to have deleted it… So everything has been made before and there are lots of prior art, but it’s just a simple techdemo and I’ve already got some ideas (pretty good, at least in my mind) how to make use of it commercially if I decide to go that way. I was instructed by a teacher to go to demo it to a certain global company.
But my real issue is this. I don’t want to get rich. I don’t want to make be a businessguy managing things, I want to make technology with wearables or something! But I don’t really want to be the grunt coding everything or building the boards, product development feels nice. So I’d need to hire me a manager or something to handle the dull things, even though it usually goes the other way around. Also, I have something against the normal company way of keeping things secret and patenthoarding and stuff. I’d prefer to keep my clients by trusting them, not keeping secrets and being mean. Also I’d prefer to fight in fields that no others are in, and being the best there after they do come. Even if they are bigger and will fight dirty. But I still would like to afford eating.
It feels so hard to base a business on my ethics. It kind of feels unfair, like there’s no choice for being unfair myself. I’d like to be proven wrong on that.
But then again it would be hard to not to accept to sell everything to someone paying millions, unless it was Microsoft. Well, even then… It really would be wonderful if there was no need to work for living, and could do whatever I wanted to. But I’m sure that I’d start wanting wrong things and might become something I don’t want to be. Money and power are some dangerous things…
I should really finish my wearable soon so I could do some real-life testing.
