Teensy Production Volumes for Covid Ventilator

G

gorges

New member
I'm volunteering for a non-profit developing a low cost clinical ventilator in response to the current Covid-19 crisis.

Without diving too far into the component selection process (mostly leaning in the direction of rapidity, ease of integration, and over-spec'ing needs for prototyping), our current functional ventilator uses the Teensy 4.0.

This is obviously not sustainable for production quantities. However, these are not ordinary times for ordinary product development cycles. With our current schedule and available volunteer expertise, we're looking at options for low risk, high confidence integration of one of the Teensy ARM controllers on our custom board.

1. Are there available resources beyond the schematics that would help us more rapidly and with high confidence spin controller boards with say the MK20DX256VLH7?
2. How unreasonable would it be to source thousands of Teensys? Tens of thousands?

Thanks for your time and I appreciate any feedback.

-J. Gorges
 
Cannot speak for PJRC and the availability of large quantities of T4s but see
https://www.pjrc.com/store/ic_mkl02.html
Which is for the earlier T3 series but has links to resources for those embedding a Teensy into a Custom device.
You can also do a forum search for 'custom teensy' which will get various threads with a fair number of failures.
A key factor is the magic sauce in the bootloader IC. These are used to take the raw micro controller and get the base code for USB and code writing onto it, and a true custom teensy will involve buying one per device anyway. If you do not intend end user to change firmware on these devices (possibly a reasonably choice in this application) then you do not need the bootloader to leave the factory, and instead use either an offboard bootloader plugged in during load or just a commercial JTAG programmer (manually or as part of production line).

Comments from Paul suggest that getting the PCB right for the T4.0 took a non trivial number of spins, so if you are new to high performance PCB design factor that into the thought process though you are probably in the position where you can break out just the pins you need, and to places that make routing easier.
 
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