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posted by janrinok on Tuesday April 14 2020, @04:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the breathing-new-life dept.

Tom's Hardware is reporting that Raspberry Pi Foundation is increasing production of its $5 Raspberry Pi Zero to meet demand from ventilator manufacturers which are using the board in their designs. The higher end Raspberry Pi boards are also reasonable desktop units for many typical home office uses, so they are being distributed in place of laptops to many working at home for the NHS. The Raspberry Pi is a low wattage single-board computer with convenient input-output hardware suitable for embedded applications but running a full Debian-based GNU/Linux distro, Raspbian.

As the need for ventilators grows, manufacturers are looking for control boards to serve as the brains of their devices. Recently, Intel was reportedly asked to produce 20,000 Broadwell processors to meet demand from medical companies. Because of its production abilities, Raspberry Pi Foundation is able to provide those orders quickly.

"One of the main challenges with rapidly scaling manufacture of products like this is that you may be able to surge production of the air-handling elements, but you still need to provide the control element: often the components you need are on 20-week lead times and (hopefully) we'll be out of the other side of this pandemic by then," said Eben Upton, CEO and Founder of Raspberry Pi. "Raspberry Pi 'builds to stock' rather than 'building to order,' so we generally have products either on-hand or in the pipeline with short lead times."

Even though Raspberry Pi builds to stock, the organization has still experienced a shortage of Raspberry Pi Zero Units, due to demand from consumers as well as the foundation's desire to hold stock for ventilator manufacturers. Upton says that the organization produced 192,000 Zero-line (Pi Zero / Zero W) products in Q1 but plans to increase that number to 250,000 going forward.

The BBC is reporting that Raspberry Pi-based ventilators are currently being tested in several locations. No word yet on how the certification process is going.

Related:
Raspberry Pi will power ventilators for COVID-19 patients
Raspberry Pi's $5 model is powering ventilators to fight coronavirus

Previously:
(2020) Company Prioritizes $15k Ventilators Over Cheaper Model Specified in Contract
(2020) Professional Ventilator Design "Open Sourced" Today by Medtronic
(2019) Interview with Eben Upton on Studies, the Raspberry Pi and IoT
(2019) Raspberry Pi Opens First High Street Store in Cambridge
(2019) Raspberry Pi Foundation Releases Compute Module 3+, the Last 40nm-Based RasPi
(2019) Raspberry Pi Foundation Announces RISC-V Foundation Membership
(2015) Raspberry Pi's Latest Computer Costs Just $5


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  • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2020, @06:29PM (9 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2020, @06:29PM (#982705)

    Hopefully an OS that doesn't need the patient to hold his breath while 1 GB of security fixes download.

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  • (Score: 3, Touché) by DannyB on Tuesday April 14 2020, @06:41PM (3 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 14 2020, @06:41PM (#982710) Journal

    I don't think Windows runs on this hardware.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Tuesday April 14 2020, @06:47PM (4 children)

    by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 14 2020, @06:47PM (#982716) Journal

    Hopefully an OS that doesn't need the patient to hold his breath while 1 GB of security fixes download.

    I hope they are using the model without networking or bluetooth. The full hardware specifications [raspberrypi.org] are more detailed. However in a nutshell, the most basic model of Raspberry Pi Zero has no networking:

    • 1GHz single-core CPU
    • 512MB RAM
    • Mini HDMI port
    • Micro USB OTG port
    • Micro USB power
    • HAT-compatible 40-pin header
    • Composite video and reset headers
    • CSI camera connector (v1.3 only)

    from Raspberry Pi Zero [raspberrypi.org]

    I would expect that is the model they are going with. However, that model is ridiculously hard to get in quantity and the Raspberry Pi Zero W model is afflicted with 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Bluetooth Low Energy and is much more common. I hope they are using the Zero and not Zero W. The updates could be managed by turning off the machine and then putting in a new microSD card, which is not a highly-skilled task.

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    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday April 14 2020, @07:51PM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday April 14 2020, @07:51PM (#982739) Journal

      I would expect that is the model they are going with. However, that model is ridiculously hard to get in quantity and the Raspberry Pi Zero W model is afflicted with 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Bluetooth Low Energy and is much more common.

      This is based on what I've read on the forums.

      Production has apparently been low and intermittent for all Zero models. They aren't sold at a loss, but they are closer to break-even than other models. They have tried to keep the supply for individuals in check by enforcing one-per-customer-transaction at the $5/$10 price, but large users could always bulk order them directly from RPi Trading if they needed them. So the ventilator manufacturers will be able to get what they need, and this boost in production is meant to address that.

      It is even possible to get customized Raspberry Pis:

      https://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-76955/l/raspberry-pi-customization-service [element14.com]

      Maybe add a real time clock?

      Even if these are sold much higher than $5-$15, it should be negligible compared to the rest of the ventilator.

      I hope they are using the Zero and not Zero W.

      I would be surprised if they get hacked. Just because it has wireless doesn't mean it would be connected to the internet, and I doubt anybody would risk approaching or entering a coronavirus-filled hospital to try to hack these at short range with the intention of killing patients. Go ahead, build a ventilator with Zero W in it.

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    • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday April 15 2020, @06:20AM (1 child)

      by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 15 2020, @06:20AM (#982955) Journal

      The article specifically says that it is a Raspberry Pi Zero that is being used

      The current version of Raspberry Pi Zero claims both Bluetooth and 802.11n WIFI.

      • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday April 15 2020, @06:22AM

        by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 15 2020, @06:22AM (#982956) Journal
        I should have read the last paragraph of your comment before replying! Apologies.
    • (Score: 2) by Unixnut on Thursday April 16 2020, @10:14AM

      by Unixnut (5779) on Thursday April 16 2020, @10:14AM (#983514)

      > I hope they are using the model without networking or bluetooth.

      Why would that make a difference? Just because a machine has BT/networking hardware on it, does not mean it has to be used, or even turned on. Indeed I don't think I have ever used the onboard BT of the pi. If I don't configure and enable it, its just dead silicon.

      Sure, if you can get the pi without that stuff cheaper for your project, that is great, but if it is urgent you get it quickly, and it is not a pure profit driven motive, I don't see a problem with using whatever meets your minimum specs, even if it has hardware/features you will not use.