First Sets of Parts Manufactured

First Sets of Parts Manufactured

Hello Project RED supporters, We’ve completed fabricating the first 4 sets of “pre-production” ventilator parts with our manufacturing partner, HLH Prototypes, and the fabrication went off with almost zero issues! “Pre-production” means that these are the part designs we plan to use in the final production ventilator, but we assume there will be some small issues found and tweaks made between now and then. HLH also provided us a DFM (design for manufacturability) report stating that there are no major manufacturability concerns, and this design can readily be scaled up to manufacturing hundreds or thousands of units without any problem. This is great news, and is a testament to the close attention to detail and many review cycles we underwent during the mechanical CAD design. The fabricated parts include sheet metal pieces, machined polycarbonate blocks, machined aluminum, and 3D printed ABS parts. Some photos are posted below.

Our next step is to put together 4 finished ventilator units, and we plan to do this before the end of November. Two units will be assembled in California, and two units will be assembled with our partner in Nepal, Paaila Technology. On the software side, we recently achieved a significant milestone where the GUI processor is now talking to the ventilation processor, and we can control ventilation functions directly from the GUI (rather than from a debug console)! You can see a video of this below.

(One comment on the video: the first two breaths delivered are “test breaths” where the machine measures the elasticity of the patients’ lungs… it’s not a bug. Another comment, it sounds a lot louder in the video than it is in real life.  ). As the COVID-19 crisis continues to spread, we’re working hard to make our low-cost ventilator a reality, so we can license the design to countries that need to scale up their supply of this essential technology. While we are seeking grants, at the moment this project is mostly self-funded, so we appreciate any support you can offer! And if you are interested in a collaboration, or in licensing our technology, please contact us.