Does one of the n95 cotton candy machines even exist in the US?
I would love to see the specs for them made free and open so anyone could attempt to produce one and then have it vetted.
Contributing to e.g. firmware code for the thing is like the only meaningful thing I could put my skills towards in this epidemic. It would be an honor to do so.
The problem is not the specs and firmware code with these machines, it is the precision and tuning it to get good quality output. In the physical world, working with sub-micron polymer products is not something you solve with software. They wrote in the article about some challenges, none is trivial and none is due to hiding the specs or writing bad code.
The latency is due to those physical constraints, as you say and as discussed in the article. But that doesn't mean that IP constraints hinder the embarrassingly parallel scale out of multiple new machines put together by different people in different places.
Now, having 100 new machines ready in 5 months might be little better than 3 new ones in 5 months.
I don't mean to be one of those assholes that presumes software subsumes all problems, but my experience working with engineers is that they confuse a non-software hard part with a non-software critical path: even though software is the easy part, there are still gains to be had from making the easy part easier.
The article mentions this Florida company as one of the suppliers of such machines. They have a reasonably informative website.
http://www.hillsinc.net
I would love to see the specs for them made free and open so anyone could attempt to produce one and then have it vetted.
Contributing to e.g. firmware code for the thing is like the only meaningful thing I could put my skills towards in this epidemic. It would be an honor to do so.