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April 19, 2020 04:34 am

As Raspberry Pi Sales Skyrocket, Eben Upton Applauds Efforts of Open Hardware Community

"Sales of Raspberry Pi's single-board computers hit 640,000 in March, the second-biggest month for sales since they started selling," reports TechRepublic, "as consumers flocked to inexpensive ways to work and learn from home."But that's not all, Eben Upton tells them:With the pandemic having highlighted shortages in personal protective equipment (PPE), 3D-printing manufacturers and hobbyists have been building face shields printed on plastic acetate that can be quickly assembled and delivered to hospitals, for free. "A lot of that is Pi-driven," Upton explained, noting that OctoPrint, which is the most popular platform for managing 3D printers, runs on Raspberry Pi... "[M]aking face shields seems to be a community effort. You have people with a home printer, printing these things once a week and then going to a post office and sending them," he said. "Then you'll have some people sat in a hack space receiving the parcels, cutting the acetate and the elastic, assembling them into face shields then sending them to the hospital. It's amazing." Upton suggested this effort could eventually be ramped up to a "massively distributed scale", with the benefit of open source being that, once you have a good design that works, it can be rapidly iterated. In the long term, this could even include the ventilators themselves, he said. "One thing we're seeing with this is people finding a niche within which open hardware really works," he said.

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