KiCad Community Meetup

[Seth_h]

Hi Folks-

Last week’s meetup was nice to see and talk with other KiCad users. Let’s do it again this week,

2020-04-01T16:00:00Z → 2020-04-01T17:30:00Z

This week, I’m happy to answer questions and I’ll be working through designing a KiCad version of the Medtronic OpenVentilator project (http://www.medtronic.com/openventilator). You may have heard that Medtronic (a multi-billion $ company) bought the company that cancelled the original gov’t contract for low-cost ventilators in 2015 and then this week released a “kind of” open source version of their current (not low-cost) ventilator.

In reality, they released scans of the schematics and some word documents for bring-up procedures. I’m going to see if we can turn the scans into a set of useful KiCad schematics + board files. This still doesn’t get to what’s needed to actually recreate more of these ventilators but it is a needed first step.

If you are curious about recreating designs from incomplete schematics, reverse engineering in KiCad or just want to hang out and chat, please stop by. Link is below:

Jitsi Meet

[Drew_Fustini]

Awesome. It would be great if you have a couple minutes to show your curved traces work-in-progress. thanks

[craftyjon]

For what it’s worth, I want to note that if anyone joins a Jitsi call using Firefox, it will likely make the call experience worse for everyone. I know this is annoying for an open-source community, but I will mention that right now the only recommended way to use Jitsi is via Google Chrome.

See: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758

[Rene_Poschl]

As it came up in the meetup, here the link to the symgen used to create the new logic symbols made by @bobc https://github.com/bobc/kicad-symgen

[Seth_h]

The basic repository is here https://gitlab.com/sethhillbrand/openventilator

I’m working in the CPU_RB0505 directory but the other boards are currently up for grabs if you’d like to take on some re-work. We are developing this with the KiCad master branch/nightly builds.

[janvi]

This design works standalone or requires any external Oxygen source (as they have in Hospitals from wall outlets)?

[Seth_h]

Requires hospital-grade O2 supply.

[Drew_Fustini]

@Seth_h another one today?

[Seth_h]

Not today, sorry. I’m up to eyeballs in project management on this at the moment. 70+ engineers, 5 manufacturers, 3 continents.

[Drew_Fustini]

No problem, hope the projects go well!