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What did we learn from the "open source ventilator" mess.......

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Smokey:
Why argue about if we should allow garage shop ventilators to be used in hospitals when there is a better solution to the problem?  This is sort of the mentality I'm trying to point out is stupid here.

The choices aren't garage shop ventilator or die. 

The third option is...... Let professional engineers who solve problems for a living make a professional quality ventilator to a reasonable spec, get that thing certified quickly, and then use that!  As pointed out, the JPL team finished their design AND got it certified in 37 days.  Because that's what they do.  Respect.  The "makers" on the internet were still trying to figure out what the little triangle symbol on the schematic meant at 37 days and making mechanical death traps out of stuff they found in their garage.

james_s:

--- Quote from: helius on July 07, 2020, 02:51:54 am ---You don't have to imagine: that's what in fact happened.

The P-51 Mustang, probably the most iconic US warbird, had "an uncommonly short development period, even during the war"; it first flew 149 days after the contract was drawn up. Its first deployment was over a year later when it entered service in the RAF.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_P-51_Mustang

The operational history of Axis planes shows similarly long programmes of testing and refinement.
(The Me-262 took over three years from its first flight until deployment in the Luftwaffe)

--- End quote ---

That's crazy fast, just over a year from the contract being drawn up to deployment? The development and certification time for something like a civilian airliner is more like 4-8 years. The Me-262 was a bit of a special case since it was an entirely new type of aircraft, metallurgy was not yet up to the needs of producing a reliable axial flow jet engine and IIRC even the very last production models had engines that could last approximately 25 hours of flight time. It was held back by limitations of the technology available at the time, not by bureaucracy.

The entire war spanned just 6 years and within that period many dozens of different aircraft went from the drawing board to large scale deployment. Technological development went from fabric covered biplanes to early jet powered fighters, the speed at which all of this happened was unlike anything we have seen before or since. Almost none of those aircraft were certified the way they would have had to be in peacetime, that was bypassed and they were rushed into service. Practically overnight we had companies transition from building things like cars and washing machines to airplanes and engines, there wasn't time to worry about regulations and red tape, we just did it.

james_s:

--- Quote from: Smokey on July 07, 2020, 03:20:48 am ---Why argue about if we should allow garage shop ventilators to be used in hospitals when there is a better solution to the problem?  This is sort of the mentality I'm trying to point out is stupid here.

The choices aren't garage shop ventilator or die. 

--- End quote ---

We know that now, we didn't know that at the time.

When the open source stuff was being developed it was a response to dire predictions of tens of thousands of people dying due to a lack of available ventilators. We can hardly blame people for making efforts to solve this problem, it's easy with the benefit of hindsight to point it out as a wasted effort, but had things panned out differently that may not have been the case. If we'd had hundreds of people dying every day, people being rejected from hospitals due to lack of available space, equipment and staff and it had turned out that ventilators were critical to patient survival I don't think it's unreasonable to imagine makeshift clinics operated by loosely trained volunteers using whatever equipment they could get their hands on, or creative people taking care of their family and neighbors. There are plenty of real world examples of this sort of thing in war-torn third world countries.

The open source projects were abandoned due to lack of necessity as the predicted acute shortage of proper certified machines never materialized, not because an amateur or volunteer constructed machine couldn't have saved lives.

EEVblog:

--- Quote from: Smokey on July 06, 2020, 12:19:31 pm ---Now that the dust has settled and it's not apparently trending anymore...
If you got caught up in the open source ventilator rush and spent any amount of time thinking about that problem seriously, try out these questions.  It's never a total waste of time if you learned something.

1) Raise your hand if... You learned something about being way overconfident in your own functional skills.

2) Raise your hand if... You learned being a "maker" isn't the same as being an engineer.

3) Raise your hand if... You learned that the design of a life critical medical device is more complicated than you thought and deserves more respect than you thought.

4) Raise your hand if... You learned that knowing something about electronics or software does not imply you can design mechanical systems.

5) Raise your hand if... You learned that even if you have a functional design, that does not mean you can successfully manufacture a product.

6) Raise your hand if... You learned that always having 100% "open source" ideological purity isn't really that important and harping on it isn't always helpful.

7) Raise your hand if... After learning how silly the basic idea of open source community designed ventilators are, you volunteered delivering food to old folks in your community or some other useful activity.

--- End quote ---

8 ) Raise your hand if you learned that 90% of covid patients who go on ventilators die anyway  :o
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-22/almost-9-in-10-covid-19-patients-on-ventilators-died-in-study

filssavi:
I would not conflate the open source philosophy with makers.

On one hand you have a development method used by thousands of software engineers and programmers, used to develop, most of the software stack that runs the modern world (if all open source software stopped working today, we would be thrown back to the late 1800 basically).

On the other you have a bunch of donning Kruger know it all “makers”. Who, strong of their experience building led lighting and crappy second year undergraduate control systems, think that in a matter of weeks you can go from not knowing anything about a subject to mass production (which in itself for a maker is almost risible); only taking care of posting each brain fart on some blog/YouTube/website for publicity

The JPL team, on the other hand, for which I have massive respect, did the design, I’m shure with the help of life support specialists at NASA and their institutional knowledge in the field, got it certified, and then posted online for publicity. That is a much different attitude.

As for certification, the regulators know full well that doing a full blown year+ certification in those conditions of need was unthinkable, they started doing emergency certifications, which were both much faster and much easier to get.

To end on a hopeful note, not all makers are so hopelessly full of themselves, a bunch of people’s (the majority I hope) rightfully identified an area where they could indeed help, and started 3D printing face shield components. PPEs are just as important and lifesaving as ventilators (actually they might even be more important) and are a much easier target, since a malfunction will not result in life altering injuries or death

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