3D Supply

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Inspiration

This pandemic has highlighted how fragile the global supply chains can be. Manufacturers have had a hard time keeping up with the surge in demand and quarantine measures have affected the production of essential protective equipment.

Meanwhile, the 3D printing community has united in the fight against Covid-19. Enthusiasts, companies and health professionals have worked together to prototype and manufacture a wide range of life saving equipment that’s in short supply. These include Nasal swabs, Ventilator valves and Personal Protective Equipment.

There are various ongoing efforts from volunteers to supply hospitals but the efforts are fragmented. There is a need for a centralized and easy way of finding and communicating between institutions in need of supplies and volunteers. We believe we can make an impact by creating a platform where designers, makers and health care professionals can cooperate to quickly produce equipment that’s urgently needed.

Our team is distributed across the globe and consists of five engineers and a designer.

What it does

We came up with a platform consisting of an Android and an iOS app we call 3D Supply. It aims to solve short term supply needs of hospitals and other health organizations by matching local demand with local manufacturing.

How we built it

Early on we decided to create a mobile app for people to connect, wherever they are in the world. Mobile apps are also great for GPS based services and getting fast notifications, which is crucial for this application.

We started by drawing a flowchart to set up some guidelines for what pages needed to be in the app and what they should contain. Following the flowchart, mock-ups were made to test usability and also functioned as guidelines for creating prototypes for iOS and Android.

As for the development, we were working in a GitHub repository and kept ourselves to the most modern development standards. We didn’t just hack something together, we created the project with a lot of future extensions and maintainability in mind. We used Trello for ticket tracking, created pull requests for each change and communicated regularly along the way.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge was to do something substantial enough within the time limit and with being in different parts of the world, we had to sync between the different time zones. One challenge with the app was that we had many ideas we wanted to go through with. However, we decided to scale down in order to showcase a clear idea.

What's next for 3D Supply

We have a lot of ideas we would like to implement and add to the project. Some of these are:

Open the platform for people with 3D modeling skills
Give people the opportunity to provide materials for the process (cooperation with filament producers)
Have volunteers delivering the products to the health institutions
Add several features to the app, like a backend system, persistence layer, profile page(s) and a chat function
Push notifications for incoming requests in your area