The team reviewed all of 39 open source ventilator projects from around the world for inspiration and more importantly battled tested designs. The team was most inspired by a project in Spain, which is one of the few emergency designs already in use in hospitals. The team borrowed the core geometry to provide compression and decompression and added design tweaks to enhance buildability and safety including a manual crank option if the motor fails. The team decided against microcontroller designs due to the added complexity of software and electronics as well as improved reliability of a purely mechanical solution.
The team reached out to all 39 teams and invited them to join a WhatsApp channel to collaborate. There are thousands of messages in this channel and some collaboration has occurred such as group work on the emergency FDA approval process.
Components of this global collaboration are being tracked in a Google Sheets spreadsheet available here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XK3MQcTtf_OLMSfJSIRCW3yJUvcXnFgfqmGIze-5d_0/edit#gid=0