My understanding regarding 3 was more they weren’t going to allow 3D printing until 3D printers were cheaper and more readily available to everyone, instead of only the top 1 or 2% of teams having easy access to a printer, and I think we’ve established that those conditions are met.
That’s the entire point of the size and weight specs IMO. I still honestly don’t see how proving the less-competitive teams with ready to go CAD files bolsters them at all, because there’s a very high chance that the raw part as it is downloaded won’t work for that team’s robot… and if they have little to no idea how to use CAD software, then the part is little to no good for them anyways, as they’ll probably want/need to create their own part from scratch in order to decently understand CADing anyways. By keeping the 3D parts we’re allowed to print small, it means that the less competitive teams won’t be as far behind/at as much of a disadvantage, since the parts will play less of an overall role in the robot.
In what regard? Last I checked, no one has to share what they’re planning to do with lexan, let alone post their designs with it for anyone to see.
I fully agree (and, in fact, do extend this to code which I also would like to see opened up more).
My personal opinion (mainly based on my own limited foray into 3D printing) is that it’s easier to learn by taking something that already exists and making a small change to it. Maybe the part doesn’t work for the downloading team because the holes don’t line up, or they need the part to be thicker/thinner. I personally think that lowering the bar to a payoff is how to hook people. Make that first bit of success as easy as possible. Plus, this “team-sharing 3D designs” hook, flows nicely into RECF’s ethos of student-led.
Having coached a rookie team last year, just getting them to a point where they could build with the standard parts took quite a while. I can’t imagine them becoming significantly more "successful’’ by downloading someone’s vexthing-iverse part and attempting to incorporate it.
Think of it this way, that Scuff controller design that was submitted a number a years ago is widely available. How many teams do you actually see using one? How many “less competitive” teams? I understand why teams fear they may lose some sort of competitive advantage by publishing parts, code, or engineering notebooks, but I don’t think those fears are supported by reality. But, even if they may lose some “competitive advantage”, shouldn’t that just give them the motivation to become more innovative?
Yeah, I can see that. Maybe when you’re first starting out, that is the way to go. The way I’m viewing this is more, realistically, at some point you’re going to need to become self-sufficient in making parts, so the earlier you start practicing that, the better. But I can definitely see how modifying existing parts to get a grasp of how the program works would probably be better when first starting out.
I’m going to be honest, I don’t think the code, or especially the notebook are going to make as much of a difference. As far as the notebook, there’s a million and one guides on how to make a good notebook, and for the code, we’re all generally using the same concepts to track position, etc., with some variance in implementation. I do think code would probably be easier to copy line for line, as in some cases you’d be able to just change the motor ports and voila, but overall the concepts used have been extremely well documented, to where I almost would think sharing code midseason wouldn’t really help some less-competitive teams learn, especially if they’re the teams that wouldn’t bother with an autonomous otherwise.
While this is theoretically true, the issue there is that your new innovations would basically have to go on the internet for all to see, kinda killing the motivation to become more innovative.
I don’t buy this argument. Seems to me if I were a student and a bunch of teams were using the part I designed, I’d get a fairly good reputation with my peers and have some good content to flex to judges during interviews and engineering notebook.
Maybe if this proposal’s registration system included a download count, teams could see how popular their designs are. Not sure that CAD formats support it, but it would be neat if they could track their derivative CADs as well. E.g. I designed AwesomePart and then team B modified it into AwesomerPart and team C tweaked it to SomeOtherPart.
I also think the nature of the Vex season encourages innovation. I would say most teams go to multiple competitions, and they all make changes to their robots over the season. With many tournaments live-streamed or posted to YouTube, full robot designs (and their performance) are pretty easily available for others to see. Human nature, I believe, is inclined to want to make improvements to everything.
Reveal videos: ”Hi, how are you? You doing good? You’ve seen me plenty of times across the internet. Just letting you know that I’m here whenever you want me”
…and yet the biggest argument is that people would see other’s 3D prints online, somehow being a problem to innovation?
Like… You do know that a key element to create better innovative robots is by gaining more knowledge. More knowledge = more intelligence. So, if 3D printed designs were on the internet then there would be someone who can think “Hmm… this is a good idea. How can I CAD this and also improve upon this design?” Bear in mind, it doesn’t even have to be 3D files that are publicly available to the majority. It could just be images with 3 perspectives, to help provide examples of what you can build in your own software.
Fair use is only applicable when things have already been published and copyrighted. Fair use in no ways forces people to share their work with others, which is the main point of the debate we’re having here.
For what it’s worth, Thingiverse (and I assume most other places that host CADs) operate off of Creative Commons licenses, which, from what I understand (which, honestly isn’t a whole lot) works a little differently from common copyright/fair use, at least according to their website.
It definitely does. The purpose of Fair Use exemplifies that peoples creations are legally allowed to be taken if its for the sake of research or teaching. If we are using laws as a form of guidance for what is right and wrong when it comes to VEX, then I am bringing forth a law that states that it is acceptable to copy small portions of one’s work as it allows people to learn and grow off of each other as a community.
Taken as in it can be downloaded from wherever without fear of being hit with copyright infringement assuming that the original creator made it available somewhere, correct? I have a very hard time believing that any part of US law would basically allow theft under the name of education, because that’s what this sounds like right now.
When did we start going off of copyright law?
This feels like a basic moral tenant, not really based off any specific law.
I am stating, yet again, that if the forum is trying to use law-like arguments, stating that somehow “copying” is a bad thing even in small portions, then that’s wrong. There are levels of copying that are allowed if it’s for the sake of innovation and intellectual development. The objective is not to steal actual designs, but to provide the ideas to build off of. Nowhere did I mention that the website should provide 3D CAD files to just copy and paste into a 3D printer. In fact, I recently stated that it would be better to just merely provide pictures of like 3 perspectives of the CAD file for the public to see. That way, it would create a platform to create ideas to branch off of.
If you forgot, here:
based upon the aspect of:
The law permits copying of ideas for the sake of research, because research is not so much about “let me see how much I can prohibit the public from seeing this” as compared to “let’s work together to solve common problems in this world, utilizing as many resources as possible to create a consensus of the best approach at something.”
This has nothing to do with us law. It is a matter of fiat play. By forcing teams to share their designs it stops other teams from learning and makes them more likely to copy teams designs.
And I will once again re-iterate that VRC is also a competition on top of a place to learn. You don’t see people sharing their designs in other competitions.
I’ve been thinking about this more, and about how to spread knowledge about 3D printing from the better teams to the less experienced teams. I think my main issue right now with just sharing files is that it doesn’t really show the design process. I’m currently competing in VEXU, and have a robot that is at least 80% 3D printed. If we were to for example give another team the STL files of our custom wheels, I don’t believe that an inexperienced team would gain a beyond surface level understanding of the design choices that went into them. They wouldn’t see all of the iterations that we went through to get to that point, and may not notice some of the more subtle parts. I’d fully expect some teams to just download the files and print them without even taking a closer look or modifying them.
This brings me to my idea of a solution, which is to incorporate it into the excellence/design awards, or possibly make a new award just for it, and teams would have to upload some of their part files (or maybe just images, I’m not decided on that yet), and provide some documentation explaining their design process. To make it fair for teams that don’t have a 3D printer (Unless it’s a separate award), maybe there’d be a penalty in judging for having 3D printed parts without submitting some files and your design process.
TLDR: People don’t magically understand the design process just from seeing the final product, so having a system where teams show their design process would be more effective for teaching less experienced teams.
I wouldn’t consider this to be theft, since the only things you’d be required to share are things that you already knew you’d have to share before you created them, and you can also choose to make your robot without making your own 3D printed parts. If you had already made something that you didn’t intend to share, but later you were required to share it, that I would consider to be theft.
The system proposed in this thread is like living in a country with no copyright (and where everyone knows this), while the second scenario would be like having your copyright expiration date moved earlier after you’d already published your work.
Edited to add:
The proposed system is also like making modifications to works published under a copyleft license, such as the GNU General Public License or a Creative Commons Share-Alike license. If a work uses one of these licenses, then anything based on that work needs to use that license, too (or an equivalent one).
