Google X’s tether force sensor

Kinda like how “Load cell” is a fancy way to say “strain gauges in a wheatstone bridge, balanced against temperature deviation, neatly packaged and made much cheaper than the effort of sticking strain gauges directly onto your groundstation for prototyping…” (as I found out the hard way)
I made a wheatstone bridge of strain gauges when I was in 6th year in school… and a digital anemometer. Bloody idea of a patent on that is a nonsense and seems to have pissed me right off

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The Old Forum struggled with many AWE IP challenges at its start. Makani was known to be planning a patent blitz. Close peers had spend scant savings on AWE patents. Militarized AWE was a concern. CC IP was fairly new and uncertain. Our ideas were proliferating.

Our main strategy was to disclose key AWE art before any venture capitalist could claim it. There was a starting CC IP phase. “CoolIP” was a CC modification to address gaps in its formula. We declared an honor system in “Open AWE”, since the law gave us few rights without patent spending. We studied the 1920s Aviation Patent Pool. We got great patents into our Pool on a sort of MOU basis, by top folks like Olsen and Bolonkin.

Over time, the Pool aggregated more IP than any other player’s IP, like Makani or Massimo’s overtly monopolistic patenting. We found lots of invalidating prior art and workarounds to their patents. There were no great “inventive-leaps” found, a rather pathetic record. Cloud computing began to mature as we began to see AWE IP as an amorphous distributed thing, and we continued to theorize how AWE IP should work. The patent system itself was found increasingly broken by junk patents granted, and did not serve merit over capital.

The “Open AWE IP Cloud” emerged with many nuances, like open license for small developers, an open door for anyone to declare their IP, and intent for future stakeholders to settle fair compensation even for small developers who contributed art but did not declare IP or whose IP expired. Someday its expected dominant players will fairly settle with Open AWE IP.

So that’s the Open-AWE_IP-Cloud story, and context here for treating Makani’s load cell patent claim with our accustomed mix of work-around, prior art research, and equanimity. We don’t think modern AWE corporations will be able to act as IP robber barons, given sensitivity to public opinion, and the power of our numbers. Major AWE players may well choose to pay a small AWE IP Cloud royalty for its bulk statistical worth. AWEIA, our languished Industry Association, needs rebooting, as the logical entity to administer the Cloud.

All this is covered on the Old Forum as the journal-of-record for early AWE R&D.

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