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Thread: Data/project scraping DYI forums

  1. #1
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    Default Data/project scraping DYI forums

    Hey guys, I am probably going to sound incredibly naive here but do any of you think a lot of Chinese/Indian/industrial-nation-companies are scraping DIY forums for product ideas? Maybe this has been going on for a long while and I have been walking around with blinders on. The reason I ask is because on here and a Halloween forum, I have posted my Fogscreen project. I have gotten a few genuine requests for information. The latest legit request was from KANG whom I trust on here and certainly don't mind dispensing information for a true DYI project to. Most of the "other" requests I have gotten, the ones that aren't welcome, seem like they are over seas, asking me to "kindly" provide complete plans for construction. Of course, I refuse to do this. If you can't extrapolate enough from pictures and general information from regular forum posts, you probably don't have the skills to complete the project without some studying to do. It's the same reason we don't hand out Laserscope information to just anyone.

    There is a part of me that doesn't really care because I don't believe I would ever make Fogcreens to sell but there is a part of me that doesn't want someone making a killing on building my design and selling them. Not to mention that I have already taken a fair amount of time posting pics and details and I sure as shit am not going to take the time to put together a build manual for someone. I suppose if they paid me but even then... not for production.

    Although I can appreciate the traffic we get from time to time, It seems like we have had a few users (or just one user with many accounts) come in here and just pick the information bones clean looking for product ideas to capitalize on.

    I don't know, what do you guys think?

    Have any of you posted projects and then get pestered for information, especially by someone who isn't necessarily interested in a DYI build? Well, not just information, but complete specs and detailed build schematics/plans....
    Last edited by absolom7691; 04-30-2018 at 08:10.

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    Your not the only one... I have a pet peeve about a few things I've worked on. There is a academic paper out there on beam combining that is verbatim from one of my ideas I partially described from PL. Right down to the patent. The difference is they had the funding to finish the problem. I've even been asked to scan my entire library. One fellow offered me unlimited photocopier access to make him a "book" or PDF of everything I knew. He offered me like 700$.
    ~
    There are four paragraphs from PL in a published academic text that are verbatim and un-attributed from one of my PL posts. I found it in the local library when they bought the book.
    ~
    While I willfully give most of what I know about entertainment lasers in the spirit of the many professionals who taught me, when someone who is not even trying to design something arranges for their friends to harass me about a particular schematic, I get POed.
    ~
    "Please send me full details and any notebooks of repumping tubes and would you please send me a pinchoff tool, I'll pay the shipping" Gets annoying.
    ~
    "Please to have full schematics and PCB layout of abstract console immediately and teach me its use"
    ~
    "Please tell me how to reactivate a cathode after it has seen air" Not on your life am I going to let some one trash customers expensive Ion lasers with a cheap chop and pump, without a even a passivated glove box and using welding grade gas. I got burned badly by a chop and pump guy a couple of times, and the industry needed that like a plague.
    ~
    "Can you tell me how to bypass the secure rom in XYZ motherboard"... Now why would I willingly violate my NDA with my former employer..
    ~
    I had to earn the Pinch-Off tool by spending a year of part time weekend and evening work developing a small tube lab for a wealthily friend. A good ethical man. When it was purchased and given to me on perpetual long term loan it was 1200$. Now they sell the same tool for only 3200 seven years later. It took two years , many trips to the library, and a lot of experimenting to develop a hermetic pinch that works. Given the opportunity to have the real tool was golden, and resulted in a lot of research lasers and medical systems staying running. That kind of effort is not something I would give away willingly. If you don't have the Google-Fu to find it, you probably do not have the needed skills to use it.
    ~
    Yep, happens a lot. I have the joy and pleasure of seeing an optical design of mine in Walmart and Home Depot, when the owner of the patent decided to pursue teaching philosophy instead of retaining his substantial royalties and fighting for them. Net result, a fellow in China is credited with my design, and renamed it. He got his hands on it when it was decided that manufacturing in Asia was going to be cheaper then making the product in the USA long term. The copy was out in three months..
    The only good news is when I need one of my award winning parts, I don't have to make it myself.
    ~
    Believe me, I do hold back a bit from what I can really post to PL or show at SELEM, and for good reason.. Yet sometimes I benefit when people publish stuff, too.. TWO EDGE SWORD, and must be balanced accordingly. Knowledge that takes months or years to learn, where I have to pay for research reports and documents, or make a trip out of state, or frying stuff by trail and error, is EXPENSIVE. Expensive stuff gets retained and kept quiet.
    ~
    Your not the only one... When you get really good at doing things, the requests can switch to threats., If we're ever together at Selem, ask me about the Biker Gang who wanted a free medium frame Krypton and "Knew where I lived". That individual had a massive chest of gold teeth, gold fillings, and jewelry from the cemetery across from his house. His children played with the teeth of the dead.
    ~
    People are people, and most of us are inherently greedy. Not all of us are that lazy, however.
    ~
    Steve
    Last edited by mixedgas; 04-30-2018 at 10:05.
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  3. #3
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    Quote Originally Posted by mixedgas View Post
    Your not the only one... When you get really good at doing things, the requests can switch to threats., If we're ever together at Selem, ask me about the Biker Gang who wanted a free medium frame Krypton and "Knew where I lived". That individual had a massive chest of gold teeth, gold fillings, and jewelry from the cemetery across from his house. His children played with the teeth of the dead.
    ~
    Steve
    I would be inclined to say that was a tall tale but if I have learned anything, it's that truth is far stranger than fiction. Jesus... Crazy. While I haven't had any threats, the very first person to hit me up about it PM'd on both forums and email and youtube and somehow found me on facebook and messaged me there! He first messaged me on youtube, asking me for advice on building a fogscreen. Okay, no problem "Here's the URL for the build threads" . I sent him here and to the Halloween forum. He came back and proceeded to tell me that there was not much information provided in the threads and wanted my sketchup files, list of my suppliers, and a list of materials. It was at that point in which I became a lot less helpful.

    Like you, if someone is asking me the right questions and just needs some advice, I have no problem helping out. I am more than happy to do so but there is no way I am going to proxy-build something for someone.

    I imagine you get pestered a lot because I can only imagine what your library of documents looks like

    Well, I figured it wasn't just me that this was happing to.

    People are people, and most of us are inherently greedy. Not all of us are that lazy, however.

    Very true. Thankfully there are good people out there too. Which is why these communities do still work!

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    Considering how the guy with the recent fogscreen patent hyped it say a decade ago, a lot of us wanted to know how it worked. Especially with the claims (probably false) of using no water vapor , no fog juice, only pure ambient air. Laminar flow is NOT an easy piece of engineering to get right. So I'm not surprised there is a quest to copy it.
    ~

    Another interesting discussion is the guy who patented lumia and diffraction gratings a few years ago and took a bunch of big lighting companies to the cleaners. They settled when settling was cheaper then being tied up with perpetual court motions.

    Steve
    Last edited by mixedgas; 04-30-2018 at 10:52.
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    Quote Originally Posted by mixedgas View Post

    Well, he got a gas intact OEM lexel, that lit but would never align... Lit made him happy... As he told me, "He could align any tube ever made". Put the head on his porch one morning and ran like hell.
    I don't doubt it. People like that set me on edge.

    Never fix a friends / neighbors TV or VCR either, it will haunt you for life.
    Or until you move, only to tarnish your reputation again by being the good sam in the new neighborhood. I learned this the hard way 3 times, only it was with computers. I became my neighborhood's helpdesk. One of my next-door neighbors "made" her VGA cable plug into the DB9 serial port. Of course, all the pins were shot but still, I was fairly impressed. She called me for every single software install, every new device... This was Windows95 era. I couldn't even what a mess she would have been with Windows 3.11 or worse, DOS. Same goes for fixing cars too.

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    Spent a month of spare when I was young trying to fix my Dad's friend's OS10 (or was it OS9) custom hard drives. Seems IBM serialized them to the motherboard.. I had no chance.
    But my Dad promised I could fix them. Tried putting two partial machines together.. Big mistake..
    ~
    The other howler is getting a late night call from an unknown "businessman" asking me if I could heat a six inch steel disk to incandescence from 100 feet away. He would not give me the application, so I told him to buzz off.. He told me I just missed an opportunity to make millions and I was a fool. While that may have been a great opportunity, the idea of violating ITAR and building a big gas dynamic CO2 or Chem Oxy-Iodine did not sit well with me.
    ~


    Steve
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    Quote Originally Posted by absolom7691 View Post

    Like you, if someone is asking me the right questions and just needs some advice, I have no problem helping out. I am more than happy to do so but there is no way I am going to proxy-build something for someone.
    Amen absolom and Steve!

    I’m all for the free exchange of information, but some people just want something for nothing/all of the work done FOR them.

    Back in 2012, I placed 2nd in the Open 7400 discrete logic competition. The contest required that all entries publish schematics, documentation, and a demo. Ok, cool! No problem!

    ...and then some rand-o from the internet kept hounding me for a BOM. If you can’t derive a BOM from photos and fully annotated schematics, you probably shouldn’t be building the thing in the first place.

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    Quote Originally Posted by CountFunkula View Post
    Amen absolom and Steve!

    I’m all for the free exchange of information, but some people just want something for nothing/all of the work done FOR them.

    Back in 2012, I placed 2nd in the Open 7400 discrete logic competition. The contest required that all entries publish schematics, documentation, and a demo. Ok, cool! No problem!

    ...and then some rand-o from the internet kept hounding me for a BOM. If you can’t derive a BOM from photos and fully annotated schematics, you probably shouldn’t be building the thing in the first place.
    Exactly! KANG asked me some good questions, had already gathered his own materials and was just asking for some pointers. I responded with a bunch of information because I knew he had a good grasp on what he was doing. He didn't ask me how I built this and how I built that. It was refreshing! He is welcome to pick my brain any time he wants. Same goes for most of the people on this forum. Some of these other people though... man. They want you to hold their hand while they attempt to build it.

    Quote Originally Posted by mixedgas
    Considering how the guy with the recent fogscreen patent hyped it say a decade ago, a lot of us wanted to know how it worked. Especially with the claims (probably false) of using no water vapor , no fog juice, only pure ambient air. Laminar flow is NOT an easy piece of engineering to get right. So I'm not surprised there is a quest to copy it.
    Yeah the idea that it is "just air" is complete shenanigans. In fact, I can only think of one way that would work and it would be contingent upon the ambient moisture in the air and it would require one hell of a compressor. Even then, I would be suspicious. I have seen the inside of the pro screens and while my design is pretty foreign to how the pro screens are built, the "engine" is still the same... ultrasonics and plenty 'o fans. The real secret sauce to laminar flow, I've found, is more volume/less airspeed = easier to tame.

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    ... this is not really new - had similar "sucking off ideas" since +20 years now :-(

    Here three "personal" examples:

    1. - the usual construction, dimensions, housing and appearance of the cheap chinese lasercutters (mostly known as "K40") are exact copies of my patent drawings from 1995 ...

    2. - we started the DIY-RepRap-project in 2007 with developing DIY-kits for a target price of 300USD for the printed parts and all essential "vitamins" -- and it needed some years to get momentum ... now it's a flood of complete assembled 3D-printers with even lower prices ...

    3. - the chinese laserdiode-engravers and drivers are mostly clones of clones of some of my first designs, I've started to discuss in public from 2008 on (built my first ones around 1990) ...

    Viktor

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    Quote Originally Posted by VDX View Post
    1. - the usual construction, dimensions, housing and appearance of the cheap chinese lasercutters (mostly known as "K40") are exact copies of my patent drawings from 1995 ...
    Sadly, I own one of these machines. Didn't know the was based on your design. I wouldn't have bought one, had I known that.

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