Low-Cost Opensource Mechanical Ventilator

UPDATE (April 25, 2020): We've changed the images from our scale-model prototype to the full-sized working version and added in a video link showing the ventilator in action.

April 17, 2020 | ProgressTH 

We've recently begun developing a low-cost opensource mechanical ventilator. We're using cheap and easily sourced electronic components including a locally-produced Arduino Uno-compatible microcontroller (Gravitech's Lambda board), high-torque servos used by hobbyists, and 3D printing to build our prototypes.

Our project is up on Thingiverse here. It includes some STL files for printing as well as a SketchUp 2017 file with all the parts, an assembled and labeled view, an exploded view, and the parts laid down for 3D printing. 

To add structural support to the design we're using 20mm PVC pipe easily sourced at any hardware store here in Thailand.

The ventilation itself is accomplished using a handheld resuscitation bag, with our prototype essentially automating the compression of the bag. Unlike a human hand, we can program our prototype to compress the bag at precise rates and for precise depths thus controlling both the rate at which air is delivered to a patient as well as the volume.

Background

The recent health scare has helped raise awareness of certain shortcomings regarding modern human healthcare.

Among these shortcomings is a lack of accessible and affordable essential medical equipment, particularly ventilators. 

Companies that make them keep their designs a secret and often overcharge customers for their use creating scarcity especially when they are needed most.

While there are many news stories circulating today of teams racing to build low-cost opensource mechanical ventilators, this idea isn't new nor is the necessity for a cheaper and more accessible mechanical ventilator something that just recently came up.

An MIT project described in a paper titled Design and Prototyping of a Low-cost Portable Mechanical Ventilator, is dated 2010 and specifically notes that shortages of mechanical ventilators aren't just a problem for people who can't afford them, but even in developed countries where emergencies (such as an outbreak, an accident, or natural disaster) create an influx of demand that can't be met because of the difficulty of buying additional mechanical ventilators that are complicated, expensive, and in short supply.

Into to 3D Printing Healthcare Solutions

June 16, 2019 | ProgressTH

Here is a video introduction to our ongoing Medical Maker Initiative (MMI) using 3D printing to develop healthcare solutions for local hospitals and healthcare institutions.

This project has been ongoing since 2015. We would really like to see this expand to more hospitals and healthcare institutions as well as see hospitals bring 3D printing in house with their own designers to further save time and costs. 

Follow ProgressTH.org on Instagram here. We also put all of our 3D printed models online for free at Thingiverse.com here. 

3D Printing: Friction (Spin) Welding Video Tutorial

February 8, 2018 | ProgressTH 

If you don't like waiting for glue to dry and want instant, solid joints for your 3D printed projects, friction (spin) welding might be for you.

All you need is a rotary tool and a small enough collet for a short length of 1.75mm filament, turn it on and move it along the joint.

SAFETY: Also make sure to wear eye protection. The filament is spinning at high speeds and will very often snap off and go flying. Little pieces of plastic are also ejected by the process depending on your technique, angle, and the quality of your filament.

The spinning filament creates heat via friction and fuses itself along with both pieces of plastic along the joint.

We use PLA, but have had success in the past using ABS as well. Practice makes perfect so be patient and make use of those failed prints!

We have done a written tutorial on how to fill large gaps here.

Follow ProgressTH.org on Facebook here, Instagram here, or on Twitter here. We also put all of our 3D printed models online for free at Thingiverse.com here.

3D Printed DIYbio Opensource Centrifuge

November 21, 2017 | ProgressTH Our 3D printed DIYbio centrifuge v 2.0 is operational. With version 1, we used a brushless motor used on drones which required an electronic speed controller and an Arduino microcontroller just to get it to spin. This version uses a simple 12V DC motor controlled by simply flipping a rocker switch.

A microswitch located near the cover cuts the power when the cover opens, and returns power to the motor when it is closed. It is a common safety feature found on many laboratory micro centrifuges.

Because it is much simpler and because there is a lot of extra space in the housing, a lot of expanded functions can be added later by users. While this version does not require a microcontroller of any king, there is plenty of space to add one (for timers or other functions).

Check out all the files here on Thingiverse: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2598206

Check out a quick video demonstration here:

For information on a simple DNA extraction protocol we've used in the past which utilizes a micro centrifuge, see here.

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3D Printed Scale Model RX-2 Chaipattana Low Speed Surface Aerator

November 13, 2017 | ProgressTH During a recent visit to the park, I noticed several different models of surface aerators working to keep water circulating and from becoming stagnant. One was pulled out of the water for maintenance allowing me to get a closer look. It seemed very simple and the thought of creating a floating platform with 3D printing began to grow.

Upon doing some research, I discovered the differences between the different models here in Thailand, including one of the first in Thailand and the inspiration for the design and distribution of many more around the country.

It was the RX-2 Chaipattana Low Speed Surface Aerator which was designed and built under the direction of King Bhumibol Adulyadej. While it serves the same purpose as other aerators, it does so in a very different way.

A central wheel slowly spins, lifting perforated buckets out of the water and allowing them to slowly drain with a rain-like effect.

The resulting scale model is part a tribute to the late King, part 3D printing experiment, and part kinetic sculpture.

3D Printed DIYbio Orbital Shaker

November 11, 2017 | ProgressTH Orbital shakers are used to agitate substances in closed vessels such as jars, test tubes, and enclosed bioreactors.

Our design utilizes 608zz bearings (x6), a 12v stepper motor and driver, a potentiometer, and an Arduino Micro Pro to create variable, smooth, and reliable orbital motion control.

The files, including the Arduino sketch and the SketchUp file we designed it in are all up on Thingiverse here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2633507

Wiring diagrams and additional resources will be added soon. The platform itself was specifically designed to be removable via 3 bolts. This allows users to create custom holders to keep their vessels secure while in motion. The platform moves very quickly at full speed.

A quick video demo can be seen here:

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SketchUp, OpenSCAD, and 3D Printing

October 31, 2017 | ProgressTH SketchUp is a free and easy 3D design application. Its intuitive interface and widespread adoption by designers, engineers, and hobbyists around the world help make it one of the easiest applications to get into, grow in, and find resources for your projects.

Left: Original F.Lab centrifuge rotor. Middle: Our second attempt in SketchUp to smooth-out the rotor. Right: A very smooth 400 side rotor made in OpenSCAD.

The speed at which you can "sketch" out 3D models is one of the most powerful aspects of SketchUp.

However, as few as they may be, SketchUp does have a few shortcomings.

When trying to merge complex, high-resolution objects together to add or subtract geometry, SketchUp often falters. For our 3D printed DIYbio centrifuge project, the rotor posed a particular problem.

The Problem: Line Segments 

3D Printed RX-2 Chaipattana Low Speed Surface Aerator

October 22, 2017 | ProgressTH Water aeration is important particularly in tropical countries like Thailand. Thailand's late King Bhumibol Adulyadej and the network of innovation and infrastructure he built up over the course of his life's work played a pivotal role in designing and proliferating water aeration systems across Thailand.

This includes the design, fabrication, and distribution of the Chaipattana Low Speed Surface Aerator also referred to as RX-2.

The system consists of a large wheel with perforated buckets that slowly spins. As it spins, it scoops up water which then drains from the holes in each bucket. It creates a shower effect that helps mix air and water together, thus helping treat otherwise stagnant or slow-moving water.

The RX-2 received a patent and served as inspiration for the development and deployment of many other models. Today, those traveling Thailand can see surface aerators of all kinds treating standing water and canals across the country.  King Bhumibol Adulyadej's efforts have helped transform many otherwise unsuitable bodies of water into valuable resources for agriculture, aquaculture, and recreation.

We decided to design in 3D the RX-2 and specifically a model that could be 3D printed and of course, be functional. The basic platform that holds the wheel could also be used for other purposes, such as mounting sensors or solar panels.

For now, the 3D model is available on SketchUp's 3D Warehouse here.

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3D Printed DIYbio Centrifuge V 2.0

October 21, 2017 | ProgressTH This new version of our original F.Lab centrifuge​ we are working on will use a 12v DC motor, and a basic rocker switch to make the simplest and easiest centrifuge design possible. However, the design includes provisions to add in a microswitch to automatically turn off the motor when the cover is open, and a microcontroller (Arduino Nano) for timing functions.

Additionally, the actual centrifuge rotor has been slightly modified in SketchUp to include more sides and thus produce a smoother circumference. This may help further stabilize the rotor while in motion.

While the brushless 1806/2400 drone motor was strong and fast enough, it was expensive, a bit more difficult to find for those who don't order online, and interfacing with the ESC via an Arduino is not easy for many beginners who might otherwise want to tackle the project.

The thought process behind this new version is to make a platform simple enough, and with enough options for modification and improvement so that more people build the design.

From the beginning, we plan on offering two versions that will be available on Thingiverse, one with a solid fully 3D printed cover, and one that integrates acrylic so the rotor can be viewed when in motion. This lets makers who have access and experience working with acrylic have the option for a window, while the solid cover is easier for anyone with a 3D printer to make regardless of their resources and background.

We were pleased to see others make our original centrifuge including Make Magazine​. Japan-based maker Shingo Hisakawa has already improved upon the original design, offering his improvements here for free on GitHub​. We hope this new version attracts even more enthusiasts to try out opensource DIYbio hardware.

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FabRacers: A Fun Introduction to 3D Printing

August 20, 2107 ProgressTH As 3D printing and its applications continue to work their way into our daily lives, more and more people are becoming interested in learning more about it and getting directly involved. And as 3D printing technology continues to improve and become more accessible, the number of ways people are developing to help encourage people to learn the tools and techniques involved continues to grow.

Bangkok-based makerspace, FabCafe located at the Thailand Creative & Design Center (TCDC) held a series of workshops aimed at introducing people to 3D design and 3D printing through designing, printing, and racing Tamiya electric cars.

Children and adults learned how to design their own custom car bodies in Autodesk Fusion 360, had them printed by FabCafe's many 3D printers, and raced them during the FabRacer event.

For many of the children involved, it would have been their first experience with 3D design and 3D printing, and hopefully a formative one teaching them that virtually anything can be designed and created using these emerging personal manufacturing tools.

3D Printed Loom

August 6, 2017 ProgressTH We've designed and built a 3D printed rigid heddle loom. It is a tool used by hobbyists for weaving yarn into fabric and is a great way to understand the basic principles behind how more complex looms work and learn the craft of weaving itself.

It is the first step toward an automated tabletop loom aimed at enhancing localized textile production.

This 3D printed rigid heddle loom is the first step toward making textile production more accessible. Work on perfecting the current loom design, producing accessories such as loom shuttles and reed hooks, and development of an automated tabletop loom will follow.  

The loom is about half a meter by half a meter in dimensions allowing you to weave patterns up to 400mm wide and with the warp beam system, a half meter or more in length.

The loom costs approximately 400 THB (12 USD) in PLA plastic filament to 3D print. Additional parts include approximately 3.5 meters of cheap 22mm PVC pipe and a handful of common nuts and bolts.

Because the design is opensource (all files and instructions are available here on Thingiverse), anyone can access the SketchUp design files and modify or expand on it as long as they share it too.

Why Build a 3D Printed Loom? 

We built this loom to answer the questions: where do the clothes we wear everyday come from, and is it possible to localize their production?

DIY: Friction Welding Warped 3D Prints

July 14, 2017 ProgressTH 3D printing is a great way to create prototypes, do small batch production, and customized one-off solutions. Having a wide variety of post-print techniques can help you create designs many times larger than your printer's print space, and combine parts in ways they couldn't simply be printed out as.



During the design and construction of these custom 14.5 liter (3.8 gallon) aquaponic systems, a large platform and cover was printed out. The parts were too big to print whole, so the bottom platform, the sides of the case, and the cover were all printed in halves.

3D Printing Turns Browsing for Fun to Building for Real

June 4, 2017 ProgressTH 

At one point or another while browsing a magazine, a store, or online, you'll find something interesting you wish you could have for your own but for whatever reason can't get a hold of it.

That's just what happened when browsing pictures of Japanese-style lanterns and coming across a picture of an Edo Period wooden lantern. Normally one would day dream for a moment about what it would be like to have one of their own. With 3D design and 3D printing they no longer have to day dream. They can simply deign and print out a replica of their own.

Depending on your skills and the amount of free time you have, that replica can range anywhere from a quick "sketch" model or an intricate and precise replica. For the Edo Period lantern, it was somewhere in between because of the straightforward design itself.

And now, thanks to open online 3D model libraries, you can download and print out this lantern for yourself.

The lantern project pictured above is now freely available on our Thingiverse page for others to download, print, or modify.

IoT and 3D Printing: Introducing Students to New Opportunities

March 28, 2017 ProgressTH 

Around fifty students and lecturers from Singapore's Temasek Polytechnic school recently visited Thailand to get a better idea of not only the tech scene here, but also to introduce the mostly business IT students to new ideas and skills including IoT projects and 3D design and printing.

Jackson Ng, a lecturer at Temasek Polytechnic, recently discussed with us the concept behind the trip, raising many important points about the shift practical education is taking.

For instance, a more interdisciplinary approach to education allows students to see a full set of options not only for helping them determine their future careers, but also to help them understand what is and isn't possible when approaching potentially new opportunities.

And while an IT business student might not possess the full skill sets required to prototype a project on their own, knowing the basics behind prototyping platforms like Arduino as well as 3D design and printing, gives them the knowledge they need to create more realistic objectives and better assemble teams capable of achieving those objectives.

3D Printing + Vacuum Forming

February 12, 2017 | ProgressTH 

Vacuum forming is a process involving heated, flat sheets of plastic placed over an object, and pulled around it using the suction of a vacuum. It is used on scales large and small, to make everything from handheld projects, cases for electrical equipment big and small, and even things as big as refrigerator liners.

Creating your own vacuum forming system is fairly simple, and lots of hobbyists around the world have been doing it for years.

With 3D printing, even if you lack a place to do wood or metal working required to make a vacuum forming box, you can print out and assemble one, which is what we did. That box is now up on Thingiverse here.

3 Things to Know When Getting into 3D Printing

February 10, 2017 | ProgressTH 

3D printing is the use of computer controlled machines that build up three dimensional objects layer by layer through a variety of ways, the most common being extruding hot plastic (ABS or PLA) in layers until the entire object is finished.

While 3D printing has been around for a long time as a tool for larger businesses within their R&D departments, in recent years regular folks have gotten their hands on them through projects like RepRap and the myriad of companies the opensource 3D printer project inspired — everyone from MakerBot to Ulitmaker and many in between.

Today, you can find these printers in classrooms, makerspaces, small design studios, and even in what you might call a microfactory where highly customized, small-run production is done for clients.

Have you been interested in getting into 3D printing? If so, here's a few things for you to consider.

1. Learn 3D Modelling 

While this may seem daunting at first, there are capable (and free) 3D design programs out there you can pick up in less than a week. SketchUp is one of them and the one we personally use. While it does have some limitations that require work-arounds, once you learn it, you can apply it professionally to everything from as a large as urban planning and architecture, to interior design, right down to product design and 3D printing.

3D Printing Brings the Museum to You

January 30, 2017 | ProgressTH 

Museums are great places for people to connect with history. Seeing the physical objects otherwise only learned about in distant classrooms can make an impact on people young and old alike.

And while there are interesting museums almost everywhere you go, wouldn't it be nice if you could sometimes bring the museum to you?

3D printing is now making that possible. Many museums are 3D scanning objects in their collection and posting them for free online. This allows anyone with a 3D printer to download and print out the objects.

Depending on what the object is, you can either print out a scale model of it, or a full-sized version.

And that is precisely what we decided to do to put this concept to the test.

The British Museum, located nearly on the other side of the planet from our office, is home to the Gayer-Anderson Cat, an Egyptian statue cast in the Late Period some 2,600 years ago. The museum 3D scanned the statue and uploaded it to MyMiniFactory, an online 3D model library, alongside a large number of other items.

Without the base, the model is 340 mm tall, too tall for most 3D printers. Using Netfabb Basic, a free software tool, we cut it in half and began printing it. In one day the Gayer-Anderson Cat materialized in our office, full-scale.

Medical Maker Project Continues

January 17, 2017 | ProgressTH

Since mid-2015, we've been working with the Queen Sirikit National Institute of Child Health (QSNICH) based here in Bangkok to develop prototypes and working articles for nurses, technicians, and doctors to improve their workflow and overcome challenges they face in their day-to-day routines.

This year we aim to expand this program further, by organizing regular hackathons that pair hospital staff up with designers and engineers in one and two-day sessions to solve even more problems and reach out to more hospitals and medical institutes.

We also hope to encourage QSNICH and other hospitals to consider bringing fabrication in-house, with their own biomedical designer to work with staff on a day-to-day basis. While we have been able to cut down time by years and reduce costs significantly, in-house operations overseen directly by the hospital would speed things up even further.

To see what's been done so far, take a look at these 7 projects.

1. Dermatology Tool 

Children in the dermatology department were easily scared by existing tools used to take skin samples for diagnosing conditions.

The solution was a customized 3D printed plastic bladed tool created in a variety of colors and featuring different cartoon characters on the end of the handle.

3D Printed IoT Weather Station Prototype in the Wild

December 26, 2016 | ProgressTH 

Recently, we've been working on a 3D printed, WiFi connected (Internet of Things or IoT) weather station for local farms. We have planned to make three V.1 stations; one for our rooftop garden, and two for farms outside of the city.

We've finally deployed the first V.1 station on the rooftop. We'll work out any issues that arise with this one (including issues transmitting data through the concrete roof), and modify the other two in this series. Finishing the first station required a few extra steps since our last update here.

First, we needed to modify the NodeMCU Arduino code to put the system to sleep for 10 minutes in between transmitting data. This extended the 9V 1600mA sealed lead-acid battery's life from 4-5 hours per full charge to 41 hours.

Then we needed to design and 3D print a bracket assembly to hold the solar panel in place atop the station's mast.

The Arudino code is at the end of the article. We've uploaded the 3D design files for the solar panel bracket to Thingiverse and included the SketchUp 2015 file so people can modify the design to fit the panels they have. 

Above is the read out of the rooftop station. It updates every 10 minutes, day and night. See the Arduino code after the break.  

3D Printed IoT Weather Station

December 20, 2016 | ProgressTH 

We've been working on a weather station over the past week or so, ever since we took part in FabCafe Bangkok's FARM HACK 2.0 event. With a team of Thai and Singaporean designers and engineers, a basic data logger emerged to automatically record temperature, humidity, and light level readings from a DHT11 sensor, a basic photoresistor, and coordinated by a WiFi enabled development board called a NodeMCU.

The weather station, designed in SketchUp before being 3D printed and assembled this week. 

The NodeMCU transmits the environmental data from the sensors by WiFi to an online platform called ThingSpeak created specifically for Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

There, you can see live graphs (Weather Station 0001) of your sensor data. ThingSpeak also allows you to download all of your data which you can then put into a spreadsheet either offline, or online using Google Sheets to work on it further.

The basic temperature, humidity, and light level readings were just to work out how to gather and send data. After FARM HACK 2.0 was over, we began building a solar powered station that could be placed anywhere, gather and transmit data, and serve as a platform to add in other sensors (wind speed, rainfall, soil moisture, barometric pressure, etc.) and even link the station into automation to control processes like irrigation.