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Raspberry Pi to Power Ventilators as Demand for Boards Surges
Tom's Hardware is reporting that Raspberry Pi Foundation is increasing production of its $5 Raspberry Pi Zero to meet demand from ventilator manufacturers [tomshardware.com] 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 [bbc.com]. No word yet on how the certification process is going.
Previously:
(2020) Company Prioritizes $15k Ventilators Over Cheaper Model Specified in Contract [soylentnews.org]
(2020) Professional Ventilator Design "Open Sourced" Today by Medtronic [soylentnews.org]
(2019) Interview with Eben Upton on Studies, the Raspberry Pi and IoT [soylentnews.org]
(2019) Raspberry Pi Opens First High Street Store in Cambridge [soylentnews.org]
(2019) Raspberry Pi Foundation Releases Compute Module 3+, the Last 40nm-Based RasPi [soylentnews.org]
(2019) Raspberry Pi Foundation Announces RISC-V Foundation Membership [soylentnews.org]
(2015) Raspberry Pi's Latest Computer Costs Just $5 [soylentnews.org]
