To make these newly designed ventilators, a lot of manufacturers are using the Raspberry Pi Zero, a $5 computer developed for small scale projects. While a single-core 1GHz processor with 512MB RAM might not sound too powerful, it’s enough to power a ventilator. [Read: Apple Maps will soon direct you to your nearest coronavirus testing center] Eben Upton, CEO and Founder of Raspberry Pi, told Tom’s Hardware in an interview that the company is ramping up production to meet the demand: Upton said in the first quarter of the year, the company produced 192,000 Pi Zero units; it will ramp up the production to 250,000 units going forward. 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. Yesterday, the BBC reported that a hospital in Columbia is already testing Raspberry Pi-powered ventilators. Hopefully, these tests are successful and these ventilators powered by the cheap Raspberry-Pi boards can be put to use.
