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With some countries entering into the fourth month since lock-down began, it is safe to say that global morale hasn't been at its highest. The circumstances of COVID-19 has brought on a great deal of uncertainty that continues to be felt around the world.

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Global travel restrictions, as well as the continuous rise of global cases, has created a mass need of critical medical supplies to help doctors and nurses in the fight against the devastating effects of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). There are currently 10.2 million confirmed cases of the disease, with around 5.17 million people who have recovered.

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At CircuitHub we felt compelled to support projects that provide medical aid related to the pandemic. Most recently, we have been lending our help to the Open Source Ventilator (OSV) — a team developing a simplified, low-cost, emergency-use ventilator to aid the treatment of COVID-19 patients.

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The project began as a community discussion within a Facebook group, Open Source COVID-19 Medical Supplies (OSCMS), which helped build a community of people to help combat the pandemic's devastating effects. According to the OSV website, the Facebook group grew largely and currently the project's mission is 'to develop a Field Emergency Ventilator (FEV) system to be used in an emergency situation, where a large number of basic ventilator systems are required.

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The overall goal is to develop and design a simplified, low-cost and open-source emergency-use ventilator, producible at scale to aid the treatment of COVID19 patients. Through an impressive display of coordination, OSV assembled a worldwide team from thousands of volunteer engineers, who were able to design a ready-to-use prototype in a matter of weeks.

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CircuitHub and our partner facility Worthington volunteered their time to assemble these prototypes using bare boards donated by Calumet Electronics and parts donated by DigiKey.

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You can check out the video below where Chris Denney, CTO of Worthington, takes us along to show the assembly process that many of the circuit boards, like the OSV ones, we manufacture go through:

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Our ability to easily assemble these prototypes was made possible in part due to CircuitHub’s  technology stack  — using software automation and robotics to expedite the manufacturing process. If you have any questions about CircuitHub feel free to send us an email at support@circuithub.com.

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