Hello Bhopalis. One of my school classmates is now a doctor at the Hamidia Hospital. He is looking for volunteers for Covid block duties of data entry, maintenance, plasma and blood donation.
Working with the hospital means you can have a far greater impact than being a lonely social media warrior. You can also help the poorest of the poor, not just the affluent ones who are on social media.
This work will require you to travel to the Covid blocks, and manually enter patient data and files into computers.
Let me know, and I will connect you with him over WhatsApp.
For every original artist trying to do something unique and different in India, there are a hundred thieves copying their designs and now even their content.
No, imitation is not the best form of flattery. Small entrepreneurs are struggling to keep their business afloat, struggling to pay their artisans during the covid wave.
Please visit https://instagram.com/upcycling.artist and www.usemeworks.com, buy something you like, and give a befitting response to people like vastrahandicrafts that steal from others for a living.
While you're at it, also visit https://instagram.com/diariesofnomad and www.diariesofnomad.com and support my friend Harshita.
We tried returning medicines that my father has left behind unused.
I had initially thought of donating them, till someone said it would be better to return the medicines and donate the cash.
The medicine shop chose to give us back only half the value of the medicines. So we didn't return them.
These are hard to find drugs like Solu-Medrol. Some of these took us more than a day to hunt down and purchase in Gurgaon. I am sure people desperately need them during the pandemic.
Looking through the belongings of a departed soul is not an activity I care for at all.
And yet, I am forced by destiny to do exactly that. We are donating most of my father's things. The kids are keeping some of his clothes that they wish to wear. I found some files kept between his clothes, inside which were papers related to our first car.
He has retained the handwritten purchase invoice from 1988. I don't know if he kept it for nostalgia's sake, or for legal reasons - he has also kept the sale deed which declared that he is no longer responsible for the vehicle. Memories of childhood visits to the Ganga Automobiles service centre in Chattarpur came flooding back to me.
What do I do with all this? I was thinking of getting someone to help me handle all this, but who can one call during the pandemic?
A number of people contacted me to say that they would like to donate money for the purchase of oxygen concentrators (OCs) for Covid relief in India.
Here is where you can donate money: https://aidindia.in/donate.php. When donating, in the comment's field, mention "For Saurabh's oxygen project", so we can segregate those funds for OCs.
As you may recall from my previous posts, we are working on two projects. One is to secure OCs abroad and import them. The other is to indigenously manufacture OCs. Due to various issues such as the cargo flight ban from China (and now other countries), we do not know which project will come to fruition first.
Either way, we will soon be churning out OCs, and they will soon be churning out oxygen for Covid patients. Thank you for your time (and hopefully, your money), and I will be oblidged if you can share this message.
A patient has been admitted to Park Hospital in Gurgaon. But he needs an ICU bed, which they don't have. What is a good way to start solving this problem?
PS: Not looking for my own parents.
Edit: Parents̶ 💔 🤷🏽♂️. Mom is better today. Pulmonologist says she is gonna be fine.
While clearing the dinner table tonight, Nilay burst into tears. As I hugged him and asked him what was wrong, he showed me the box of cookies that Sherebanu had so lovingly sent for the boys.
He said he was going to hide the box from dadu. But then he remembered that there is no dadu any more.
My dad loved sweet food. He had diabetes, liver cirrhosis, and his kidneys weren't doing too well either. Yet he ate sweet food all the time. The kids got used to "hiding" all the goodies, not so much to save the goodies from him as to save him from the goodies and their ill effects.
All of last night, my sister and brother-in-law monitored his sugar. His nurse gave him multiple doses of insulin. In the middle of all that, around 3am in the night, he snuck up to the fridge and swigged an entire bottle of packaged sweet lassi.
He may have died. But he died swigging the good stuff.
A single father was being moved from another hospital to Artemis, Gurgaon. At Artemis he was brought dead so the hospital did not take the body in. Meanwhile the other hospital's ambulance left. Now the body is outside the hospital, and the distraught daughter is beside it.
Who can help cremate a Sikh gentleman in Gurgaon? Khalsa Aid isn't doing cremations. United Sikh has its hands full with cremation and cannot go till Artemis.
Update: Saikat has already reached the spot and is looking for the daughter. Keeping this post up since we are unsure of next steps once we make contact with her.
We currently have two mechanical engineers, and two more folks, working on the oxygen concentrator design and prototyping.
Discussions are on WhatsApp and documents are in Google Drive/Docs.
Since this is an open source project, we would like the chats and documents to be public. But people, especially non-nerds who haven't done open source software development before, find WhatsApp and GDrive simpler than IRC and Github.
Is there a way for us to throw open our communication and documentation to the world ,while keeping the interfaces familiar? Does Telegram or Slack have open channels that random people cannot post to, but can read and then request to join.
On the Google Drive front, at least, we can throw open the folder to the public. I think it'll be simpler if I move all files from my company ID to a personal ID - sharing with domain restrictions is a pain.
Anyone got better ideas? Are there plug-and-play hosting platforms that can provide us these services, even at a charge.
Doctors do not have to die in the line of duty just because you had some stupid reason to be outside and infecting yourself.
No, they did not sign up for this shit. We are collectively responsible for the death of young doctors. And if you are putting yourself in harm's way, you are directly responsible for putting a healthcare worker in harm's way too.
The first time I was hospitalised, I was admitted within minutes. That time, I was covid positive.
A month or so later, I went for readmission, because I had a secondary fever. This time was being admitted in the Covid negative section.
I was there at the hospital at 9, perhaps 10am. I was on a bed at 5:30pm. In the interim, I and my attendant (a colleague and a friend) simply waited outside the building, in the heat of September. I had high fever.
This, when my pulmonologist had already reserved a bed for me even before I showed up. And all payments were by debit/credit card, not medical insurance (I'd run out of that long back).
Medical institutions in India sorely need to improve their processes.
If somebody offers to sell you a Dedakj oxygen concentrator for ₹1.2 lakhs, please don't buy it. And consider reporting the seller to the police.
This device was priced at not more than $150 in China till a month back. And when plugged into a patient with SpO2 89, it can't even lift them to 90. 7L/min my ass.
It can help a patient at 95 get to 97 (because the SpO2 curve is sinusoidal not linear). But anybody with SpO2 more than 90 shouldn't be provided external oxygen in the first place.
Friend of mine§ in Canada is shipping an AirSep VisionAire 5 to me to save lives in India. He is also buying two new machines from his dealer, and paying shipping out of his pocket.
Which gives me the idea. Friends in USA, Canada, etc - respiratory care devices are pretty common over there. Perhaps you too have devices in your home, or with your friends, neighbours, colleagues, lying idle ever since the senior who used them moved on to another world (or healed 🥳).
Would you consider finding such devices. If you do, I'll raise the money to pack and ship the devices, and pay GST in India, and also buy a 110V converter if required.
The number of messages I've had for oxygen in recent times. Its heartbreaking. Let's solve this together.
🙏🏽
§ Not tagging the friend, but if the name Tiny rings a bell, you know who he is.
Last night I was scaring a friend over the phone. 𝘞𝘩𝘦𝘯 this new Indian strain gets to the US, I said, you will need a lot of oxygen. Not "if", "when".
We don't know if Moderna and Pfizer vaccines can stop it. I 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 for a fact that people fully vaccinated with Covaxin are getting infected, and then becoming borderline moderate cases. And Covaxin is dead virus, so it does have a wider spectrum than mRNA.
We know that this strain is airborne now. The physics of aerosol transmission can no longer explain how it is infecting people isolated in their homes. I have paranoid neighbours who never step out, never let anyone in, haven't even talked to humans face-to-face in an year. Now they are infected and paranoid.
I hate to be the harbinger of bad news. Yet I do it so often. Sads.
As we scramble to purchase 220V to 110V convertors for the oxygen concentrators we just received, Aniket says to me, "कभी कभी तो ऐसा लग रहा है कि हम real world में नहीं जी रहे... Jumanji world में घुस गए हैं... हर पल एक नई मुसीबत"
It made me laugh in the middle of this never ending crisis. Laugh, and then frown.
[Update 2: First concentrator is home and working through a voltage converter that Sherebanu and Nishant graciously lent us. It is pumping oxygen nicely and keeping its patient above 92 SpO2. There is hope people, there is a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. Go for it, grab your concentrator and import. Save lives!]
[Update: First concentrator has cleared customs, two days after arrival at IGIA. Since Delhi and Gurgaon are both under curfew, FedEx can't allow me by law to pick it up at the airport. So I wait while FedEx brings it to me.
So if you're sending concentrators to a loved on, fire at will now. The duty free customs process has been worked out. You will need to pay 28% IGST on the purchase value of the concentrator to the FedEx/DHL guy at the time of delivery, in cash. Which means that when the shipment lands in India, FedEx/DHL will reach out to you for the commercial invoice of the item, if the invoice wasn't included by the shipper with the shipment.
There's a little plastic bag that you stick on the outside of a FedEx shipment, in which you include these papers. Tell your shipper to include the commercial invoice, as well as a little love letter indicating that this is a gift being sent to save a life, not a commercial item being sent for trade/sale.
Saikat Datta says prefer DHL - they have the customs process for these concentrators worked out better. That makes sense - German efficiency versus Tom Hanks movies about lost packages.]
If you know someone in FedEx India, I need your help. Two oxygen concentrators were shipped from the US to India, by close family, for close family. One landed at IGIA on Thursday evening IST, one landed Friday evening. Since this is a small shipment, we couldn't get our CHA involved (maybe we didn't try hard enough). FedEx India is distressingly opaque - we have no visibility into their customs clearance process.
The attached notification showed up yesterday. The central government claimed a week ago that duties are being removed from oxygen and related machinery, and yet, this is what we get. Anyway.
We don't mind paying customs duty, BCD, CVD, IGST, whatever the heck the government wants to charge us at this point. One of our concentrators landed before this notification, so we know we will pay. It doesn't matter. We just need the department's grubby hands off of our device so it can save lives. And we WON'T pay a bribe.
Please help. We clear tens of lakhs worth of goods every month and we always manage; we have learnt to live with the delays and the paperwork and the harassment. But right now, with life saving equipment, I'm at the end of my tether.
There are more concentrators up in the air right now, from the west coast and Germany. Those in China are stuck due to the cargo flights embargo. Another cousin now wants to ship one from the east coast to her family. And a few folks are waiting and watching how we fare before they ship their own concentrators.
As I just ranted to Gagandeep Singh. Its not like we are citizens of a free country with our own government. Its like our own government colonises us.
Here are two things our team at Thinvent is doing to help in the current crisis, and ideas on how you can help us:
1. We are importing oxygen concentrators from China and Thailand, in commercial quantities. We will be selling these items, not donating them. But we will sell them at a much much lower price than what black marketers are demanding today. We will basically charge a reasonable markup over the CIF cost of the item, and use that to cover support, delivery, repairing and warranty in India. We are importing properly tested products, that are capable of running 24x7 and generating 10L/min flow rates. We will be further testing each machine aggressively here in India before we sell them.
Due to various factors such as the state of the economy and the supply chain issues caused by a semiconductor shortage, we do not have much cash balance. This is typical for our company for April and May, and does not usually impact us; we plan ahead for it. However, we now have very little money to invest in the import of these concentrators. And we do not want to take an advance from potential buyers. (We have, in fact, given a 50% advance on a concentrator to an Indian vendor, who says his goods are now stuck in China. I think taking advance from buyers and then using that money to import goods is unethical, especially when what we buy here for ₹80K+GST will be sold to the vendor in China for between $150 and $200.)
So, we are looking to raise loans from you folks, to finance the purchase of this equipment. We will be paying an above market rate of interest on the funds we borrow, and giving lendors a signed loan agreement and a post dated cheque for the entire amount (with interest) upfront. The company will protect you from risks such as goods getting stuck during shipment, or, god willing, Covid suddenly vanishing and the market for oxygen concentrators in India collapsing.
2. We are recreating here in our office in India, open source designs for oximeters and oxygen concentrators. Oximeters are easy (Maxim and others just sell the sensor as a part), and https://oxikit.com is a prototype oxygen concentrator that Alastair Young kindly pointed me to. Once the prototype runs and works, we will be quickly productising and selling the item in commercial quantities. At this point we don't know what help we will need. The prototyping is cheap, so we do not need money for it. If you are not in India, we will call upon you to ship us some parts that might already be in shortage here (because, hopefully, we aren't the only ones trying to scrounge together oxygen concentrators).
We have been studying the chemical principle that underlies a concentrator, and it is fairly straightforward. A mineral called Zeolite, found at undersea volcanic eruption sites, adsorbs Nitrogen at high pressure. You take regular air from outside and pressurise it in a canister with Zeolite. Nitrogen gets adsorbed, and the balance air has 90%+ Oxygen, which is supplied to the patient(s). Then the canister is depressurised, and the Nitrogen desorbs and is let out as flue gas. Cycle repeats, patient lives. More on pressure swing adsorption here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_concentrator
It is important to manufacture concentrators in India because the total production capacity of all the manufacturers in China and Thailand combined cannot get us out of the hole we are in. Once we have an open source design that is suited to components available domestically in India, many other factories can join in. All this assumes that the high demand for oxygen concentrators will continue till the end of May. My team members were heartbroken to note that the maths checks out and there is no way this curve is plateauing before June.
[Please do not share this information with anybody looking to purchase an oxygen concentrator. We will not be accepting any orders till the goods are safely in our office, and at that time, we will make an announcement here. Basically, do not give distraught people false hope.]
We need a plasma donor for a close relative. Donor should have been Covid positive between 1 Jan and 28 March. Any blood group is fine. Donation will have to be made at BLK Hospital, Delhi. You can reach us on +91 81789 79137.
An aunt and I realised that Covid did its annual closing on April 1, figured out who all it hadn't infected over the last fiscal, then went and infected them all. सबका खाता एक साथ खोल दिया.
One of the things we do as part of our work, is import components from all over the world to India. Can someone here guide us on what it takes to import oxygen concentrators into India.
Does the BIS, CDSCO or some other body certify oxygen concentrators in India? Do they need to comply to any specific standard? Or are they unregulated household appliances, just like air purifiers.
What would be a good starting point to read about the certification or approval for sale in India of medical equipment in general?
Context: Bottled oxygen is scarce. Concentrating/enriching oxygen is easy. It helps reduce the pressure on hospitals because a number of folks are just getting hospitalised for oxygen.
I feel dejected that nobody has made a fake account in my name and asked for money yet. I might as well ask for money here myself. Hey, friend, send me the money money money 💵 💰 🪙
If your oxygen drops, breathe lying on your stomach with a fan in front of your face. This takes your SpO2 up by 5-6 points.
The doctor who treated me while I was hospitalised, has advised this to a friend of a friend. Let's hope you're able to find oxygen when the need arises, and don't have to use this technique. Also, happy to connect you with my doc in case you're feeling unwell.
40 active cases in my neighbourhood in Gurgaon. And since I've been hunting for oxygen for a few days, I can confirm - oxygen has indeed suddenly vanished from Delhi and Gurgaon. There is an acute and abnormal shortage. I finally managed to get one cylinder of oxygen, and the supplier told me that AIIMS Delhi has stopped admitting patients due to a lack of oxygen.
We've washed the curtains today. And hung them wet to drip dry. As the breeze passes through them, it cools down, and picks up the light fragrance of fresh laundry.
For this moment, I am disconnected from the realities of the world outside.
Where can I get one of these for me kids? I'm tired of knocking my kids awake every morning. The tension it causes daily is straining our relationship. Alarms don't work for them; they be deaf.
What is a more covid safe way of traveling these days - flights, or trains without air-conditioning. Asking for people in their 20s and 30s who cannot get vaccines.
Most of our customers don't realise, but a majority of our product shipments are based on the ARM processor, not x86. x86 computers are bigger, pricier, and make us more money. But ARM is seriously more fun. There is so much more we can do in terms of hardware, software and enclosure customisation.
First up are two products. One is an ARM replacement for a hot selling x86 product. We have only been wanting to make this one for 9 years. We picked up the project again an year ago, and made some progress, till I got sick with Covid. After that it has mostly languished. Now, suddenly, x86 boards have vanished, and it is score one for ARM. Next week we hope to have the product finished and launched.
The second is also an ARM product, except our not-so-friendly vendor suddenly jacked up prices on the board. So, for now, it lies abandoned. Such is life in engineering - most of your designs don't see the light of day for commercial reasons.
Finally, here are chassis designs for our new Micro 3 and Micro 5 products. We hope to replace our hottest selling product, the Micro 2, with the Micro 3, with shipments beginning as early as this month.
That's it folks. If you know someone who has at least an year's experience in PCB design, do connect us. We are backlogged on the PCB design-fab-testing front currently, and could use some help.
The next thing we have begun doing in-house is metalworking. We use aluminium blocks for heat-sinks and standoffs. We can't afford a mill or shaper for the small amount of processing we do. And the Shapeoko (https://www.facebook.com/saurabh.ja/videos/10159077530027040) just isn't up to the job. Or maybe it is. Next week it gets a Makita router to replace its hobby tool endmill, and it just might rise to the occasion.
For now we are using an angle grinder and a bench press, to precisely create 15mmx15mmx15mm Aluminium blocks. We will soon make a jig to constrain the cutting blade to a plane and allow it to slide along a straight line.
From here, we will go to a stage where we process much of our sheet metal ourselves. Laser cutters and CNC bending machines are again too big and too expensive for our needs. So we are going to fashion our own bending machine - see attached pic for an inspiration we saw online. Most of our bends are 100mm long, 90°, 0.8mm thick aluminium sheet bends. The longest we go is 200mm.
On the laser front, we will begin with a carbon laser that can etch metal, and also fashion our cardboard and foam packaging.
If you know someone who would be interested in a mechanical engineering internship, creating jigs, fixtures and processes for metalworking, do refer them.
Next up, we redesigned our workhorse. This computer is very popular with government and industrial customers. It has a bunch of legacy ports that allows them to hook up equipment that honestly should have retired long ago.
We've made the computer smaller and lighter. We've switched to gorgeous honeycomb patterned vents. And we have designed a custom PCB that lets us expose a bunch of ports without pesky cables.
We have always prided ourselves in the fact that, of all thin clients sold in India, ours is the one with the highest domestic content. We have an entire ecosystem of suppliers who provide us with cables, chassis, packaging, labeling, PCBs, adaptors, RAM and other such components - all made in India. We design all of these components in house, they manufacture them, then we assemble them all into our computers.
With this PCB, we are taking the first step towards moving away from some of our vendors, and doing things in-house. One of the key reasons is that our vendors are often unable to keep up with our pace of innovation. If we have to wait two weeks every time we do a design change, we can never get things done, especially since it often takes two to three revisions for us to get things right.
(Up next - more things being done inhouse - and some machines)
Exhibit one, is our first ever PC (mobile phone for size reference). So far, we have always only made mini PCs, thin clients and all in ones. And some kiosks and point of sale machines. But never a PC. Well, PCs do not yet require BIS certification, so they are quick and easy to launch. We put one together, and then began load testing it to make sure the electricals and thermals are stable under full load. When testing a computer, we artificially load its processor with mathematical problems (which sometimes come straight out of my Masters thesis).
After artificial loads, we needed to do real world testing. Our usual tests involve playing videos in a browser, checking our Gmail, etc. None of that puts any serious load on an 8 core, 8 GB RAM computer. So I pulled my kids in to play games.
For the first time ever, they got a chance to play PC games on a Windows computer. They can’t imagine playing games can be serious work too - wait till they hear about game testing. So we’ve got probes going into the computer measuring voltage and wattage, while they are busy gaming on it. So far the PC has held up rather well.
Hello everyone. I thought I'd give you an update on what's up on the work front with us. Not like you'd asked, but such as I am an entrepreneur and a maker, I like to occasionally talk about the stuff we are doing.
The semiconductor industry is going through a serious supply shortage, caused by (a) too many MBAs trying to create short term value in an industry that requires billions of dollars and years of patience before new plants churn out product, (b) Apple, Intel and their ilk bullying TSMC into focusing on cutting edge 5nm processes, (c) said suits forgetting that the majority of the world's chips are still made on boring old 100nm, and those chips power everything from cars to microwaves to the motherboards that run said fancy-ass 5nm processors.
The chip shortage has led to our trusted, years old suppliers rendered incapable of providing us with motherboards that power the computers we make. Some not so trusted suppliers have resorted to price gouging, doubling the prices of their boards in a matter of months (the Chinese might be communists, but they know very well how supply and demand in the free market works).
Ideally, this shortage, coupled with the out of control Covid crisis in Delhi/NCR, should have made us quietly shut our shop and wait out the storm. However, I am the kind of beast that thrives on change and chaos. Unlike me, most people in my team are sane, and prefer to keep things as stable as possible. Which is why, over the years, they’ve convinced me to make as few changes to stable products as possible.
We will start running out of boards and other components by the end of this month. Some important boards - mainstays that we sold thousands of units of - have already vanished from our shelves. Because we are smart, we spent Feb and March placing large orders for other, different boards, from new suppliers, and these have started arriving. But these boards do not fit our existing chassis, power supplies or processes. We have to retool everything.
What fun! This is my moment of glory. Since change is inevitable, I am bringing it in by the bucket-loads. But there is also a serious angle to it. One is that we expect a lock-down to happen as soon as the assembly elections are over. Before that, we need to finish all the new design work we can do. Second, if our production line stops, we will have to furlough folks. We did not cut pay or lay off people through the entire Covid crisis, but our finances are now stretched thin. So we are racing against time to get new products into our lines before they stop.
