Implausible and overfunded CPAP machine on Indiegogo

That said, my dollars are staying snugly in my pocket for this campaign. It's pretty farfetched, and I don't like the metric they used to illustrate the actual pushing power. It doesn't add up.

I'm not sure if this device is plausible, but I know this calculation is not useful. You're calculating the mass of air moved, which, first of all, does not itself say much about the energy required to do so; for instance, horizontal motion doesn't require any net energy (though any real device doing so will of course need to do something to accelerate and decelerate, there's nothing to say it can't be very, very cheap). Second you appear to be discussing it as if there isn't a pair of lungs right there providing motive power. I do that much moving of the air every day (plus a bit, probably, I'm a tall guy) with no batteries at all.

This thing is not responsible for "moving all that air"... it's responsible for a pressure increase of the air, which is at least somewhat equivalent to saying it's responsible for "moving air" but only a fraction of the value you computed. They say it is supposed to do from 1 to 20 "centimeters of water". According to the Great and Mighty Internet, 20 cmH20 is 0.02 atmospheres, just to give some perspective. I do not have the math to calculate the energy requirement that represents when the air is in motion itself; my physics would only be sufficient to calculate the energy implied in pressurizing a closed container from 1 to 1.02 atmospheres, which is useless in this case. Perhaps someone else can pop up for that.

(Bear in mind I took a full standard College physics-for-non-majors course set, using full calculus, and what I know from that is that what I know is inadequate... if that also describes your experience, your education is inadequate too. We're going to need to hear from someone with more specialized education.)

My suspicion is that yes, this device is plausible, but the final version is going to be larger than the versions shown. Whether it crosses over the invisible line where people become unwilling to wear it is anybody's guess, but... sleep apnea sucks and those masks do suck too, so there's some room for these guys to work in. I'd classify this as a "considered risk" rather than "two orders of magnitude impossible". I reserve the right to change this assessment as more data comes in, especially a (good!) physics analysis of the real energy required to do this.

So the world of doctors and medicine is one that's highly regulated, has a lot of hierarchy and deference built in, and doesn't train people for things other than their job.

This leads people to not value knowing much other than their job since the the hierarchy means that they'll get abused if they offer advice, and the regulation means that nobody can really listen to it anyhow.

What you end up with is people who are fairly trusting and not terribly knowledgeable outside of their discipline. So if an engineer (or someone engineer-ey) tells a doctor that something can be done and there's no obvious reason it can't be (cell phones are powered all day off of a battery, it's not going to fly, it doesn't cure cancer, etc) then it's entirely possible they'll just say "great! when do we start" rather than try and figure it out for themselves. And I mean things today are crazy from the perspective of someone who spent 20-30 years getting educated to make what, $100k-$300k? How many 30-something website billionaires are there? It would be really easy for someone to say "if this wunderkind says it can be done good enough for me" and go along with things.

Further even if 90% of the doctors out there had the background and training and everything to spot this as a fraud, that still leaves 10% which is a large pool of people who you could dupe.

But they are extremely intrusive to sleep, especially if you have a partner. A better CPAP machine is needed. But I won't give them pre-order money, more because I've seen way too many bad crowd-sourcing projects than out of specific concerns towards this project.

For $3 I'll buy it on a whim and try it out. I'd try a larger one that was significantly smaller than a standard CPAP for $20, maybe even $50.

But whether or not the project is legit is kind of beside the point to me right now. Having done a lot of prototyping of my own, in both software and hardware, it bothers me to see people jump directly to crowdfunding before they've even built a hot-glue-and-wires version of a prototype. Prove the concept. It's not that freaking hard.

All they say they've done is built the shell of the noseplug. They haven't any idea how to get the electronics on the inside. Their FAQ page makes it sound like their understanding of cutting edge electronics comes from Popular Mechanics, or Boing Boing.

People act like hardware is so extra-special hard. It's not. It's no more or less difficult than hacking on software in your free time. The actual, core functionality of your project, whether it's hardware or software, should be possible to validate in less than a month. The rest of what it takes to turn any project into a real product will far eclipse the proof-of-concept work in the level of effort necessary. There's no such thing as "if you build it, they will come".

Okay, no, Elon Musk's Hyperloop can't be validated in a month. A brand-new, hyper-secure, microkernel operating system written in Rust wouldn't be, either. I'm not saying all ideas are possible in a month, I'm just saying the stuff people typically do in the given spaces as garage inventors are on the short-scale for validation.

It just takes up a little to a lot more space. But if you're dedicated, most people can find the space. I'm sure a few adults like supposedly involved in this project can rent out a small warehouse on their pocket cash together. I don't even work full-time, I live in one of the worst areas of the country for real estate prices right now, and even I could scrap together the money for a small warehouse, if I had to.

It's going to be hard if you don't have any experience in hardware. Yeah, but even making a simple CRUD app is going to be hard if you don't have any experience in software. We live in a golden age of hardware development. Nearly everyone and their neighbor in the US has a garage full of tools that could bootstrap a small industrial renaissance in a 3rd world country.

Or you don't even have to buy anything, design a flat-pack vector layout in Inkscape, email it to any of the thousands of laser-cutting services in the country, tell them you're fine buying scrap material, wait a couple of days, and you can make anything the size of a breadbox for about $50.

Need more complexity? Make a 3D model in blender, send it off to any of the dozens of (and growing) 3D printing services, wait a couple of days, and you can make anything the size of an old Walkman for about $50. Seriously, don't buy your own 3D printer unless you want to get into the business of maintaining 3D printers. Outsource that malarky.

But come on, if you don't believe in your project enough to put your own time and money into it, how do you expect us to believe in it? (though, I know that isn't really stopping anyone).

Talk about it and spread the word to others that this is impossible to do.

There's also some interesting discussion here, mostly to the tune of "it won't work":

http://www.eevblog.com/forum/crowd-funded-projects/the-airin...