Well this brings up another question, are any of you aprehensive about posting pictures or drawings of your project out of concern that some one may take the Idea and market it on the net?
If I were designing something that I thought had market value, I would not publish it until I had filed for a patent as John Hasler states below.
If you plan on patenting your invention and exploiting or selling it then you should not publish it until you have at least filed for a provisional patent as such publication could render it unpatentable. On the other hand if you have no intention of trying to make money from it, what's the harm in some else attempting to do so?
I do have a patent, a rather complex electro-chemical device. The main reason it was patented is so I had well defined intellectual property to sell along with the working model, this made the product much more valuable and the transfer of the IP much easier. I do wish that I had patented the electronic circuit breaker function separately. I also have several other 'inventions' that are useful, some of which are in consumer products, that could have been, but, never were patented.
Were I to come up with ''the widget that everyone needs'' and it was actually new technology, I would consider a patent. Other than that, I would just simply start manufacturing and be the first to market, and hope it would take the Chinese at least a year to get theirs to market. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, most the stuff I work on is so specialized that entire market is one or two units to very small.
The tooling and other stuff that I might post on this or other forums is stuff that I want to share with others so that they can benefit from some of my experience, and I want it copied and used if someone finds it useful to them. If someone thinks they can find a market, more power to them.
