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Winning 1st Prize by Stealing Someone Else's Hard Work...

A project log for 3D Printable Raman Probe

This a 100% 3D printed Transmission Raman Probe (low resolution) W/built-in cuvette holder/Raman filter

david-h-haffner-srDavid H Haffner Sr 03/01/2018 at 15:094 Comments

I felt compelled to talk a little about personal honor and how it may be sorely lacking today in this "open source" continuum we call the digital verse. When I started my Raman Probe project, I got the inspiration for it by researching homemade raman spectrometers on Google images, I ran into this interesting project that seemed like it may be what I had been looking for, since my previous attempt at this technique just where not panning out.

I certainly was doing something wrong and needed to learn a lot more, so I studied this paper; http://article.sapub.org/10.5923.j.jlce.20150304.02.html , still kinda frustrating because they left a lot of critical information out pertaining to the build part, good job on the Raman data part, but it left me having to figure out how they arrived at focal distances and what not.

Anyway, the point of this is, I could have just straight up ripped off their project piece by piece, giving no credit and hoping no one would ever find it on the internet...Ha, ha, ha, always remember if YOU found it, then someone else can too.

I for one, am a man of honor, they have a creative commons license so I not only gave them credit, also the link to the research paper and the group of individuals involved,

Secondly, I redesigned most of their project so it would work for me, so I could design it on FreeCad. I redesigned the spectrometer enclosure, the probe itself and the mirror and diffraction grating and re-calculated errors I found in their original paper and fixed them. 

This is truly what is meant by "inspired by."

A real genuis, @Alain Mauer has a project called; Arduino Glasses a HMD for Multimeter, he clearly put in the hard work and intellect necessary to pull that off, he deserves the credit...open source or not, the individual who blatantly ripped it off, won 1st prize in a contest and is now selling it for a profit, and getting comments about what a "genius" he is for doing it.

He has almost 1/2 a million views on Youtube, that's unacceptable everyone, most of us here are former engineers, programmers and what not from a various backgrounds but we all have the same thing in common, respect and honor as human beings, it's not really that hard to police ourselves and call out those who choose to commit the cardinal sin of intellectual theft for profit.

Lets just try and think about that a little more in our endeavours when we are creating such wonderful devices.

Discussions

Morning.Star wrote 03/02/2018 at 10:04 point

Alain has Prior Art, thats part of the purpose of Hackaday itself.

It would not be too much trouble to write to the competition organisers and strip the little ratbag of his glory. That would also very quickly end his Youtube days, nobody likes a fraud.

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David H Haffner Sr wrote 03/02/2018 at 12:15 point

That's a very wise idea...

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Dr. Cockroach wrote 03/01/2018 at 16:25 point

David, you hit the nail on the head :-)

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David H Haffner Sr wrote 03/01/2018 at 16:33 point

Thank Doc, I just felt compelled today to remind everyone about the importance about the honest one's out here to keep an eye out for the worms among us.

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