Planet Arduino

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we interact with people, things, and the world around us. We’re calling on the community to use an Arduino Nano or MKR board to build solutions that can help us practice better social distancing, improve queue management, or enable touch-free technologies.

Stepping out from our homes, to go to schools, factories, offices and pursue leisure pastimes all these will need to change as lockdown restrictions are eased. With terms like social distancing, remote learning and remote working becoming the norm, let’s see how your ideas can help the world move forward and rebuild everyday life based on a project in one of these two categories.

Category 1: Touch-Free

Create a solution that can be applied to devices that currently rely upon manually pushing a button e.g. elevators, pedestrian crossings, door entry systems, sanitizer dispensers, etc.

Category 2: Social Distance Enablement and Tracking

Create a solution that will allow individuals to maintain the recommended distance apart (1m to 2m) to safely work in the office, factory, commute to work on public transport, or socially interact in cafes and parks. The time people spend within close proximity to each other may also be a factor considered within the design.

N.B. The purpose of the competition is to create products and solutions that are ready to help people around the world to move forward with their lives and safely emerge from lockdown restrictions, rather than developing medical devices.

Contest Scope and Schedule

As any potential solution may be required to operate in a variety of environments, important factors to consider as part of the design process are reliability, durability, connectivity, and power management — hence the option to base your project on any Arduino Nano or MKR board.

The Arduino MKR Family represents the ideal solution for emerging battery powered IoT edge applications. All of the MKR boards share a common pinout for developers to easily shift between wireless communication protocols with minimal software changes, and in a cost efficient manner.

The Arduino Nano Family offers a tiny format, powerful processors and excellent reliability. All of the Nano boards can run embedded machine learning (AI).

The challenge is organized in two phases:

Phase 1: Apply for hardware — Deadline June 16th, 2020: Submit your idea and have the opportunity to receive a free Arduino MKR WiFi 1010.

Phase 2: Submit your project — Deadline July 14th, 2020: Submit your project for a chance to win up to $10,000 worth of prizes!

Prizes

We are giving away tens of thousands of dollars in prizes to the top five projects, including product assessment and marketing support to bring your project to market! Our judges are going to pick the best qualifying projects based on the judging criteria outlined in the rules section.

Grand Prize

$5,000 voucher for hardware on the Newark online store
$750 of pre-manufacturing assessment with Dragon Innovation
$5,000 towards product marketing with Hackster.io

Touch-Free

1st Place — Touch-Free

$1,500 voucher for hardware on the Newark online store
$750 of pre-manufacturing assessment with Dragon Innovation
$3,000 towards product marketing with Hackster.io

2nd Place — Touch-Free

$500 voucher for hardware on the Newark online store
$750 of pre-manufacturing assessment with Dragon Innovation
$2,000 towards product marketing with Hackster.io

Social Distance Enablement & Tracking

1st Place — Social Distance Enablement & Tracking

$1,500 voucher for hardware on the Newark online store
$750 of pre-manufacturing assessment with Dragon Innovation
$3,000 towards product marketing with Hackster.io

2nd Place — Social Distance Enablement & Tracking

$500 voucher for hardware on the Newark online store
$750 of pre-manufacturing assessment with Dragon Innovation
$2,000 towards product marketing with Hackster.io

How will you help change the world? Join the contest now!

This article was written by César Garcia, researcher at La Hora Maker.

Welcome to the second article in this series on ventilators! As we’ve seen last week, ventilators are critical pieces of infrastructure. They must work reliably for long periods of time without missing a beat. Today we will uncover what are the different phases involved in developing one of these devices. Please, note that this process is a simplified one, based on current circumstances. It usually takes much more time to get one ventilator ready to market.

First stage is the ideation phase. In this initial stage, teams need to decide what technology they will use for their design. One of the most common these days is repurposing an AMBU, by operating it mechanically. There are other alternatives although like pneumatical, based on electro valves, etc, and some of the models approved in Spain involve techniques like High Frequency Jet Ventilation– that is a complete departure from the AMBU models! 

Given that the device is going to be used by medical personnel, it’s really important to look at the clinically relevant parameters for these devices. The MIT e-Vent team has done a wonderful job documenting these clinical aspects. You can find the key ventilator specifications to consider on their site.

It’s also worth noting that not all ventilators are meant to work the same. Some of them are better tailored for emergencies, while others are designed to support the patient for longer periods. Mechanical ventilators are covered by several ISO norms like 80601-2-12:2020. Several agencies have made the specifications available for free, to help new initiatives to develop ventilators against COVID-19.

Once you know which approach you would like to take, it’s time to start working on your first functional prototype.  Most of the designs will require you to get sensors and valves, as well as basic medical supplies. As per the control unit, we would recommend you to take a look at the Arduino boards better suited to the task in this presentation by Dario Pennisi.

Getting your prototype to pump air is the first step. But you need to control the amount of air in a precise way. Too much-pressurized gas could damage the patient lungs while falling short could suffocate them too. There are two approaches to this issue – some ventilators keep track of the volume of air, while others focus on pressure. To test this, you will need a lung simulator – there are plain simple models to really complex ones. UK’s MHRA offers an extensive test suite for Rapid Manufactured Ventilator Systems (RMVS) for this crisis. You can explore the test at Appendix B. 

If you are producing ventilators in the UK, this is the main mandatory step right now. In other countries, like Spain, the regulation is a bit more complex – we will focus on those additional steps in the rest of this article.

Once you pass all tests with the simulator, you are required to run clinical tests with animals. As you can imagine, this is not something you can do at your local hackerspace or Fablab. Veterinarians and doctors need to supervise the test, and validate if your device works as expected. Even if you pass some initial tests, you may still need to do more extensive trials. If you plan to produce a non-emergency ventilator, you might be required to repeat tests on pathological animals.

Let’s say you pass all these tests, what is next step? You need to supply your prototype and manuals to an external lab. The goal is to make a third party verify the device specs in a controlled environment. They will test for Electromagnetic compliance, so that the device doesn’t interfere with external ICU equipment, neither is affected by third party emissions.

Once you have your documentation ready, you can submit it for review for the local regulatory agency (AEMPS in Spain, FDA in the USA), to receive final approval! Does this mean that the device is certified? Not really!

Regular certification doesn’t just focus on the device, but also on the manufacturing methods, facilities, quality control, etc. To produce certain equipment, you need to ensure the environmental conditions at the factory, proper hygienic procedures, etc are maintained.

How do you make sure that none of the people assembling or printing is not affected by coronavirus? Most prototypes that have passed all tests have been produced by companies with manufacturing experience. Some projects like Oxygen, offer a maker version and an industrial version, that was manufactured by a car company. In their repository, you can find all documents required to move from prototype to an industrial device!

So, how are these devices going to be deployed? In Spain, they are being used as devices in a clinical trial. Ethical committees in the hospitals would need to approve the trials and set the rules for actual usage.  These devices will be used by trained doctors as compassive devices: if no other ventilator is available, they could decide to use them, after getting permission by patients or relatives. These clinical trials would start with a few patients and then scale to larger numbers if required.

In the next episodes, we will explore the stories behind some of these prototypes!

Combating COVID-19 Conference: A Collaborative Arduino Community Initiative 
to take place on April 2nd at 5pm CET

Humanity is facing one of the most trying events in its history and as technologists, makers and designers we are asking ourselves how can we help. 

How can we contribute to the efforts to save lives, to help our fellow human beings?

All of us have been thinking about this and observing what was going on in the world.

We have seen communities, including the Arduino community, trying to design devices that would help hospitals cope with the lack of equipment; we’ve seen people firing up their imagination and their 3d printers in an effort to build something that could save even a single human life.

Having noticed that a large number of these efforts are using Arduino technology we reached out to a number of these communities to offer our help, donate some hardware, provide engineering support and do whatever we can considering that we are a small company.

One thing that was striking to us is the large amount of duplication in the work people are doing – many people are spending valuable time trying to overcome similar challenges in their design, rather than sharing their solution to the benefit of all and moving on to the next hurdle. Also that there are different teams with different strengths and skill sets that would be better working together than apart.

We must do better, be more effective, work together and merge efforts to solve these problems and reach our common goal quicker and more efficiently.

Because of all of this we want to invite as many of these projects as possible to an online gathering, to get people talking, to offer help on how to design and make hardware, how to think about the software, and how to scale manufacturing (we would like to share our knowledge in making tens of thousands of open source boards per week). Finally and most importantly we must take guidance from  medical professionals so that they can steer requirements and validate the designs so our efforts have the most positive impact. 

Join us online on April, 2nd to understand how we can work together to do better together, and Together – Let’s Make Covid-19 History

David Cuartielles, Massimo Banzi co-founders of Arduino (on behalf of Arduino)

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Combating COVID-19 Conference: A Collaborative Arduino Community Initiative
will take place on April 2nd at 17.00 CET.

This is an open invitation to anyone currently using Arduino compatible devices within a project to design and manufacture ventilators, respirators or other devices to combat COVID-19. Be you a doctor, an academic, a professional company/researcher or an innovator you are more than welcome to join the conference. 

The conference will be hosted in Zoom (link available soon), with the ability to interact with Arduino and other members on the conference via Discord (free download here). 

There are different ways to participate in the conference; you can present your Arduino based project to combat COVID-19, support other community projects or provide expert advice – we are all stronger together.

(N.B. if you want to present and share your project, please complete this form by 12.00 (noon) CET on April 2nd)

More information on the conference will be available soon, in the meantime you can learn more about Arduino’s overall response to COVID-19 emergency here.

For the latest update regarding Arduino’s response to the Covid-19 outbreak please click here.

Priority Service for the Design & Production of Essential Medical and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)

As companies around the globe rapidly react to governments’ calls to produce critical medical equipment like ventilators and PPE, Arduino is prioritizing stock allocation for these urgent needs.

If your company urgently requires any Arduino hardware or software to facilitate the prototyping and production of any equipment or solution to lessen the impact of Covid-19 please contact us.

A dedicated team will work to ensure we support your needs through ensuring the fastest possible delivery (either directly or via sub-distribution) and/or expediting production as required. We will also provide increased levels of design support and help for those designing such critical equipment.