Perhaps one of the clearest indications of the Anthropocene may be the presence of plastic. Starting with the commercialization of Bakelite in 1907 by Leo Baekeland, plastics have taken the world by storm. Courtesy of being easy to mold into any imaginable shape along with a wide range of properties that depend on the exact polymer used, it’s hard to imagine modern-day society without plastics.
Yet as the saying goes, there never is a free lunch. In the case of plastics it would appear that the exact same properties that make them so desirable also risk them becoming a hazard to not just our environment, but also to ourselves. With plastics degrading mostly into ever smaller pieces once released into the environment, they eventually become small enough to hitch a ride from our food into our bloodstream and from there into our organs, including our brain as evidenced by a recent study.
Multiple studies have indicated that this bioaccumulation of plastics might be harmful, raising the question about how to mitigate and prevent both the ingestion of microplastics as well as producing them in the first place.
Here at Hackaday, we pride ourselves on bringing you the latest and greatest projects for your viewing pleasure. But sometimes we come across a creation so interesting that we find ourselves compelled to write about it, even if it’s already been hanging around the Internet for years. This may or may not be due to the fact that we just re-watched Crimson Tide, and found ourselves on a self-imposed dive into a very particular rabbit hole…
If you’ve seen Crimson Tide, or the first few minutes of WarGames, you might already know what this post is about. Both films prominently make use of a one-time authentication device which the user snaps in half to reveal a card that has some secret code printed on it — and as it turns out, there are at least two different projects that aim to replicate the props used in the movies.
What would it be like to have to design and build a ventilator, suitable for clinical use, in ten days? One that could be built entirely from locally-sourced parts, and kept oxygen waste to a minimum? This is the challenge [John Dingley] and many others faced at the start of COVID-19 pandemic when very little was known for certain.
Back then it was not even known if a vaccine was possible, or how bad it would ultimately get. But it was known that hospitalized patients could not breathe without a ventilator, and based on projections it was possible that the UK as a whole could need as many as 30,000 ventilators within eight weeks. In this worst-case scenario the only option would be to build them locally, and towards that end groups were approached to design and build a ventilator, suitable for clinical use, in just ten days.
A ventilator suitable for use on a patient with an infectious disease has a number of design constraints, even before taking into account the need to use only domestically-sourced parts.
[John] decided to create a documentary called Breathe For Me: Building Ventilators for a COVID Apocalypse, not just to tell the stories of his group and others, but also as a snapshot of what things were like at that time. In short it was challenging, exhausting, occasionally frustrating, but also rewarding to be able to actually deliver a workable solution.
In the end, building tens of thousands of ventilators locally wasn’t required. But [John] felt that the whole experience was a pretty unique situation and a remarkable engineering challenge for him, his team, and many others. He decided to do what he could to document it, a task he approached with a typical hacker spirit: by watching and reading tutorials on everything from conducting and filming interviews to how to use editing software before deciding to just roll up his sleeves and go for it.
We’re very glad he did, and the effort reminds us somewhat of the book IGNITION! which aimed to record a history of technical development that would otherwise have simply disappeared from living memory.
You can watch Breathe for Me just below the page break, and there’s additional information about the film if you’d like to know a bit more. And if you are thinking the name [John Dingley] sounds familiar, that’s probably because we have featured his work — mainly on self-balancing personal electric vehicles — quite a few times in the past.
