Since many of us, including me, got more free time during the pandemic because the quarantine and the resulting situation, I decided to help the fight against the coronavirus by using my expertise where applicable. For free. I contributed in four projects.
- Joined Slovene volunteer group that decided to keep meaningful and reliable daily statistic data and models about the various aspects of the pandemic. Such data is priceless for keeping on pandemic progress. For some reason our government was and is still unable to provide this data in an useful way (initially it was much worse), hence the motivation. The website is COVID-19 Sledilnik and it is run by many great volunteers. Everything is open source as well and new volunteers are welcome to join. My part is the REST API service that converts manually collected data into a machine friendly way for data consummation. It’s an ASP.NET Core 3.1 web application packed in a docker container. It also features Swagger metadata and Prometheus support. Feel free to consume the data, but some terms apply, check FAQ.
- Joined a large group of volunteers and electronics enthusiasts at S5tech.net with 3D printing various protective visors for health workers and laser cutting the transparent part. We created and manufactured visors based on various designs with most popular being Prusa’s one. Each 3D print would take around 3 hours. We distributed for free something like 1000 complete visors before switch to injection moulding because of the huge demand, that solved the production speed greatly. Everything was given away for free and still is. We managed to send them even to a neighboring Italy.
- Created a 3D model for Xiaomi Mi Roborock HEPA filter adapter for Decathlon snorkeling mask extension and printed a couple of them. The mask mentioned is a full face mask that should protect one fairly well in case of various viruses, including the SARS-CoV-2. The idea is to mount it on the intake tube and protect yourself from inhaling it or getting it through eyes. The filter in question is HEPA quality, freely available, not expensive and should filter the air pretty well – the classic face masks have the problem that they don’t cover eyes and they were also unavailable due to the shortage at the time. However I never did really test it (how could I?) or wear the mask for real. It was just a fun experiment for something that might come handy in case the situation deteriorated really badly. Anyway, get the model on thingiverse.
NOTE: You still need to print the mask adapter from the link above.
- Joined forces with scientists in search for a COVID-19 cure through distributed computing based on molecular docking. My part is helping them running computations on plenty of CPU cores on Azure cloud. The project is ongoing and crunching numbers as I write this.
That’s it so far. I believe I contributed quite a lot of my free time and hopefully, somebody somewhere will benefit from it health-wise. As for me, I got new experiences, expertise and met a lot of wonderful, resourceful and smart people along the path and if the effort helped even a single person, I’m happy.