Open Design Ecology

There is no registration to use the Creative Commons licenses. Licensing a work is as simple as selecting which of the six licenses best meets your goals, and then marking your work in some way so that others know that you have chosen to release the work under the terms of that license.

Copyleft is a practice to use copyright law but to give away and copies of something for free and also allowing it to be remixed in anyway, making it public domain. This has increased recently due to many movements to make information free and it is though that this is the only way for people to use their imagination to the fullest.

Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor. It has gained popularity for being completely free and editable, which means if you believe there is something missing from it, you can add it yourself. It is always being updated as it is always receiving feedback from the public on how it can be better and the creators listen to most of these.

Wikimedia Commons is a website which offers free images, sounds, and others for the public to use free of charge and hassle free. There are more than 19 million files on Wikimedia, which mostly use the Creative Commons Licence which means it is free and no risks or breaching any copyright law.

Rob Canning showed us many open source websites, one we found out about was Makercase.com which give you ready made templates for boxes and also has the ability to apply your own designs and type ready for laser cutting or engraving. MakerCase also sets up the laser cutter to cut our the box panels with your designs so it would be ready for building after one go in a laser cutter with your own personal designs on it.

Easy Laser Cut Case Design

When entering the site, straight away you are welcomed with a simple box template ready for you to edit. It gives you the options to change al the box dimensions such as Width and Height. The material thickness is also customisable and lets you choose from the different materials that you are using.

Each panel can be altered, this can be adding a design or extending the tab width and also if the design and type you added would be cut out or just engraved. This all created for you to have your own freedom and to make it your own.

Adding the text for engraving.

My final design and template which can now be laser cut with my own design/logo engraved onto it.
This has been done completely by using MakerCase and is also their template design.

Rob Canning then went on to talk about Arduino and the many things you can create using Arduino and coding.

Arduino is a is a single-board microcontroller which lets you code and program many things to work your way, such as lights and mechanisms.

Arduino's can be bought separated and ready-made or also as a 'do it yourself' kit for people who would like to make it their own way and for more personal uses.