Raspberry Pi-powered ventilator to be tested in Colombia

No technical details there, unfortunately. A bit more here, a similar project, where the Pi is only used for the user interface which seems a safe choice with its flimsy SD card (and Raspbian probably?) which I wouldn't trust for a machine deciding on life & death for 3 weeks continuously. One bit flipped and you're dead.

On 14 Apr 2020 "A. Dumas" wrote: [Raspberry Pi vetilator]

Hardly. The Pi will be running a very small simple program in memory, and will only be logging to the SD card. From industrial experience Raspberry Pi's can run for years doing that, far longer than a Pi ventalator will be needed for. But should they be required again, I recommend replacing the SD card with a new one, every 2 years of continuous use, out of an abundance of caution.

---druck

you made my day :)

The pi does not supply the power, it supplies the brains.

On Tue, 14 Apr 2020 14:38:43 +0100, "David J. Ruck" declaimed the following:

If that much... Amateur Radio Pi-Star configuration sets the SD card to RO (except during nightly updates -- which I don't see a ventilator performing), putting logs into RAM... I suppose for a ventilator one might use a soft "power" switch to a GPIO, and have power-down set SD R/W, copy RAM logs to card, then shutdown...

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	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN 
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I currently like this

It is absolutely no problem to activate the National Guard, and Reservists, Medical and Nursing Students and what not to sit with suitable PPE between 2 beds with orders to call for help if a ventilator fails.

Been sitting next to restless patients not ill enough for ICU for 2 nights a week for 4 years myself to pay my way through Medical School in Germany. Boring but doable.

I even remember a particular bad night when I was sent to Neurological ICU where they were in need of massive amounts of anti clotting drugs which came in very small ampules. I don't ever want to do something like this again, but doable.

Even manually ventilating with Ambu-Bags as a last resort is doable.

el

On 14/04/2020 10:40, A. Dumas wrote: [...]

[...]

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I can't imagine you in protective suit doing this for hours - and I mean full protective and 24/7

Neither can I.

But, been there, done that, patient walked away from it :-)-O. And after that (one total power failure during surgery) I even regularly practiced it. I even recall (vaguely, though) an article in the "tropical Doctor" in the late 80's about manually bagging during abdominal surgery.

It is not a difficult skill to acquire, it is just exhausting, so the limiting factor is the number of able bodies in PPE to keep shifts around 2 hours.

It is however, I agree, the very last option.

But, I really would love to see the MIT thingy in action :-)-O

el

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Dr. Eberhard W. Lisse   \         /       Obstetrician & Gynaecologist 
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so for a single person I would need 12 people for around 10 days - what I meant was not that it is impossible to do but impossible to scale. How many people are needed to do it for 2000 or for 10000 who do not have ventilators? It is obvious.

IMO it turns out our political leaders are all more or less idiots. They closed hospitals cut fundings for universities and hospitals. They even knew since 2002 first SARS COV-1. I saw SARS scenario study in Germany for

2012 according which 20000 beds are missing to handle such epidemic. They never invested. They never made it public. They accuse WHO now, but told them to shut up in January - only because they wanted the casino on Wall Street to keep open for another and another week. This is going OT now, but I couldn't stand, sorry. All of them are doing the same left and right and we are speculating if RPi could drive a ventilator. Pathetic!

no,

you need 5 per patient, 2 hours on, 8 hours off, and one as a spare. Of which only one is at the bedside any time. So for a 700 bed hospital in a conference center you need a (reinforced) Infantry Regiment (strengthwise).

Not likely, but not unrealistic either.

el

[Rant removed]

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