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

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SerieZ:

--- Quote from: NANDBlog on July 10, 2020, 09:10:11 am ---About ramping up production: My experience is, that ramping up some parts of production is not hard. The PnP machine easily can handle larger quantities, more shifts. Same goes for injection moulding. And the manual parts of assembly can be augmented by more people, or smarter organisation. This is usually not the hard part.
What I've seen is that the bottleneck is usually the testing of the device. They very likely functionally test each and every ventillator before shipping it. And the test bench of this is going to be the bottleneck. For example, if is possible that they have an artificial lung, government approved, calibrated, specifically designed to test ventilators. And then you need to connect your device to this, and do a x hour burn in test, to avoid early failures, and to prove your device is assembled correctly. Could be two hours, could be 24 hours, who knows? The test length probably was designed to reduce the chance of early failure to the ppm level. And that lung with all the sensors and equipment connected to it is very time consuming to put together, very expensive, and requires exotic parts, that you need to order yourself. And when you order them, they have a lead time. And very expensive. So if you want to just 2x or 3x your throughput, you might just pull in more shifts.
But you want x10? Invest hundreds of thousands in equipment, that will just sit there afterwards? Hire people in the middle of the pandemic for a new job to work at night? What if you just run out of factory floor space, because all these require space. Pull up a building next to it? Or assemble medical equipment in tents?

--- End quote ---

You are correct. Every single PCB inside the Ventilator is ICT ,Functionally and/or burn in tested and the final assembled machine as well undergoes several testing. Every single machine is signed off and not just shipped like a regular product either. This happens in several facilities (supplier and the company who builds the final assembled machine as well).

Just think about it: The Global market leader used to produce maybe 1500 Ventilators a Year and now the USA alone wants 100000 ASAP.

Regarding the rest of the Thread: a noble pursuit those DIY Ventilators and developed in a month or two by Nasa/Tesla... Ventilators but not quite feasible IMHO for many many reasons.

tggzzz:

--- Quote from: EEVblog on July 10, 2020, 09:37:12 am ---
--- Quote from: tggzzz on July 10, 2020, 09:29:25 am ---
--- Quote from: EEVblog on July 10, 2020, 08:30:20 am ---
--- Quote from: Smokey on July 09, 2020, 09:55:12 pm ---So most of the arguments being made are assuming pre Corona virus lockdown supply chain and vendor availability options.  "Just order more parts, what's the problem?". That completely ignores the fact that whole factories were shut down, whole supply chain shipping options were shut down, and whole global economies were shut down.  That video with the descriptions of parts sourcing issues from the JPL supply chain person really makes that clear.  They needed to do a new design based on stuff they could actually get.  Whether the assembly has five parts or thousands of parts, The unavailability of just one part is a show stopper.  Halt production.  And I'm not sure if you caught that part at the end about the BOM freeze.  Even for non-life critical applications oftentimes you can't just make part and vendor substitutions at will.  Being design engineers I know for sure that we should appreciate the fact that just because the data sheets look the same on first pass does not mean the parts are interchangeable in a specific application.  In this case, the consequences of part incompatibility isn't another BOM revision and maybe some RMAs, it's dead people.

--- End quote ---

If you can say that about production stuff, then you can say the same, ever more so, about hastily hacked together solutions.
And therein lies a possible problem with the entire concept in the first place.
Perhaps it was simply never possible to develop something like this so quickly when a lot of supply chains and production systems of any type were shut, and the product was required to save lives and not take them.

--- End quote ---

It might have been possible, iff the right skills were available. That means a working team with the specific domain knowledge,  implementation skills, manufacturing experience, supply line experience.
--- End quote ---

You mean like Medtronics and other makers that already had and produced existing working certified designs?  ;D

--- End quote ---

Amongst others, and possibly competent new entrants into the field.

Established manufacturers ought to be looking at preserving their reputation after the immediate crisis has passed. They might take actions to ensure that "panic products" aren't associated with their name.

Smokey:

--- Quote from: EEVblog on July 10, 2020, 08:30:20 am ---
--- Quote from: Smokey on July 09, 2020, 09:55:12 pm ---So most of the arguments being made are assuming pre Corona virus lockdown supply chain and vendor availability options.  "Just order more parts, what's the problem?". That completely ignores the fact that whole factories were shut down, whole supply chain shipping options were shut down, and whole global economies were shut down.  That video with the descriptions of parts sourcing issues from the JPL supply chain person really makes that clear.  They needed to do a new design based on stuff they could actually get.  Whether the assembly has five parts or thousands of parts, The unavailability of just one part is a show stopper.  Halt production.  And I'm not sure if you caught that part at the end about the BOM freeze.  Even for non-life critical applications oftentimes you can't just make part and vendor substitutions at will.  Being design engineers I know for sure that we should appreciate the fact that just because the data sheets look the same on first pass does not mean the parts are interchangeable in a specific application.  In this case, the consequences of part incompatibility isn't another BOM revision and maybe some RMAs, it's dead people.

--- End quote ---

If you can say that about production stuff, then you can say the same, ever more so, about hastily hacked together solutions.
And therein lies a possible problem with the entire concept in the first place.
Perhaps it was simply never possible to develop something like this so quickly when a lot of supply chains and production systems of any type were shut, and the product was required to save lives and not take them.

--- End quote ---

I think we are converging.  I do think the hacked together solutions were doomed to failure for a whole number of reasons including parts issues, complexity, and especially specialized knowledge and experience, which all should have obviously put the project out of reach of your average garage maker-gineer but didn't for a lot of people who still had delusions of saving the world. 

But from what I can tell about the JPL solution, it doesn't look very hacked together.  It looks more mars rover like than an ambubag squeezed by a windshield wiper motor between two pieces of plywood controlled by an Arduino.  They apparently had the kind of team that could do the work and the understanding that they needed to source parts they could still get even with the jacked up supply chain.

The Medtronic guys certainly know how to make a ventilator, but that doesn't mean they know how to make a new model ventilator super quickly.  That's sort of like asking Tektronix to make a new scope model super quickly.  That's not how that company works.  They take their damn sweet time, and everyone knows it.  Instead pass the proven spec to the skunkworks teams and let them do what they do best with the implementation. 

tooki:

--- Quote from: Gyro on July 07, 2020, 09:24:13 pm ---You're kidding right? You have the most litigious society in the world.  ::)


--- End quote ---
By total cost of litigation, the US does lead (followed by Canada and the UK). But in terms of litigiousness (number of lawsuits per capita), the US is only #5. The UK is #6. Places 4 through 1 are Austria, Israel, Sweden, and Germany!!

Source: https://www.jurorsrule.com/10-most-litigious-countries-in-the-world/

What I find very interesting is that the US is fifth place by a pretty wide margin. Another page I found listed these numbers (cases/1000 people):

1) Germany: 123.2/1,000

2) Sweden: 111.2/1,000

3) Israel: 96.8/1,000

4) Austria: 95.9/1,000

5) U.S.: 74.5/1,000

6) U.K.: 64.4/1,000

7) Denmark: 62.5/1,000

8 ⁠) Hungary: 52.4/1,000

9) Portugal: 40.7/1,000

10) France: 40.3/1,000

(The source of those numbers is said to be  ‘Exploring Global Landscapes of Litigation’ by Christian Wollschlager, a 1998 book. Bear in mind that IMHO, frivolous lawsuits in USA peaked in the 80s and 90s, but were never as big a problem as the media made it out to be.)

EEVblog:

--- Quote from: Smokey on July 10, 2020, 12:33:30 pm ---The Medtronic guys certainly know how to make a ventilator, but that doesn't mean they know how to make a new model ventilator super quickly.
--- End quote ---

Nobody is saying they had to make a new design, just make more of what they already produced.
Let's be serious here, if it was that important, like war-time important, like everyone-dying important, the government could have made that production happen.
There was literally nothing stopping that production happening but government mandated shutdowns and fear.
Let's be practical, whether those mythical 100,000 units came from backyard labs or from existing manufacturers, it still requires very similar levels of local and global logistics to make that happen.

Remember, even during the worst of this whole thing, people were still working keeping society running, by several accounts up to 40% of the workforce were still out there doing their thing. This could have included emergency manufacture of medical equipment if it was so mandated.

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