- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
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This further illustrates how absolutely crazy it is to produce these devices for a single use and then just throw them away, not even making sure they can be recycled properly. It’s complete madness. I hope they’ll be banned soon, I think the EU is working on it.
They should absolutely ban disposable but as long as they’re smart about it and don’t try and make it a general vape ban. Anything with a microcontroller and OLED display should need regulation to be “disposable”. So fucking wasteful.
Vapes can and have always been something you can pop a battery and cartridge and custom juice in. There’s zero reason to make it disposable. Make the coil/cotton/juice cartridge disposable… Like a juul was last I checked? That’s reasonable.
And then next regulate how much nicotine can be in per ml. 60mg/ml is fucking insane. That is heart issue level of nicotine. I got buzzed off 12 mg/ml, used 3 or 6mg/ml regularly, and quit at 1.5mg/ml. There’s no fucking reason other than harm and addiction to provide 60mg/ml.
OLED maybe but small micros are now so cheap and so small that they’re negligible.
Battery is probably still the biggest environmental impact.
One of those 3 cent one time programmable microcontrollers would be sufficient. Something with enough power to run a web server is just wasteful.
Germany only allows 20mg/ml, I didn’t know there were countries that allowed 60??? 😭
Du kriegst auch in Deutschland sehr leicht Vapes mit mehr als 20mg/ml, sind nur eben illegal. Der Schwarzmarkt für Vapes ist groß
don’t try and make it a general vape ban. In some EU contries 10ml liquid costs more than pack of cigarettes, so they defacto banned vaping. how much nicotine can be in per ml. 60mg/ml 20 mg/ml is EU wide limit since 2025
The regulation provides that by 2027 portable batteries incorporated into appliances should be removable and replaceable by the end-user
Coming soon…
Disposable vapes are already forbidden, at least in France, idk if it is union wide.
But yeah, those things make no sense. The only thing with a battery that should be disposable would be fire alarm. Not because of the battery, but because the main sensor has a 10 years lifespan due to its natural deterioration.
I feel the same way about earpods.
Compared to a vape pen AirPods have insane life span. It’s still bad, but not even in the same ballpark as something you usually throw away in a week or so.
That’s fine for airpods but as someone who worked retail, there’s just as many $15 earbuds that break near instantly that have to be thrown away and never fixed. Those things have 3 batteries in them.
You can also have your dying AirPods replaced at the battery rate of $40 too. Still doesn’t strike the overall problem, especially since Apple doesn’t advertise that replacement.
yeah, no one ever loses an airpod…
oh wait
Not sure what you mean. Are you implying that because on occasion some people will lose an AirPod they are somehow worse than vape pods that are designed to be disposed of within days after first use?
people who like the concept don’t give a fuck about the environment, it’s just convenient for them so fuck it.
I’m sure you’ll justify it for yourself lol.
you don’t need them, you just like them, and don’t care that it’s created an entire new class of ewaste.
People lose phones more often, huge source of e-waste that we should ban first. In fact most people wouldn’t even have a reason to buy the earbuds if they didn’t have a phone in the first place.
People lose phones more often
something tells me they don’t just evaporate, never to be used used again, but resold.
hard to resell a single earbud.
“it was actually a PY32F002B, powered by a 24 MHz Arm Cortex M0+ processor. The chip also carried 24KB of flash storage and 3KB of static RAM”
To process a single button.
Because an existing SoC at scale is cheaper than a custom ASIC.
You see this all the time, custom keyboard running ARM+Linux, SmartNICs using RISC-V cores/FPGAs instead of ASIC accelerators. Even Microsoft refuses to commit to ASICs for network processing in their DCs and use FPGAs instead.
A vape is a battery connected to a button connected to a heating coil. You might want a single transistor. You don’t need a software platform.
There is also a battery management system as well.
M0 processors are dirt cheap, especially in bulk.
They probably have a BMS library that takes a few Kb of flash.
The time it would take to make the design cost effective wouldn’t be worth it.
Slap a less than a dollar mcu and be done with it.
I used to be into vaping and a big mechanical vape fan. I still have all of my old mech vapes! Those were what you’re thinking of—a button, a conducive body, and a coil or two mounted to a post. You pop an 18650 in, no transistor or resistors needed. You adjust your wattage by changing the way you wrap your coils, and your wire gauge. Generally I’d like to run around .2 ohms, which pushes about 18-20 amps out of the 18650s.
These are NOT devices you want in the hands of regular people lawl. I’ve had friends in years past love how my setup was and get similar vapes for themselves. I’ve seen a burned-down backpack (RIP, all of his adderall XR), a table almost catch fire, and burnt carpet. No explosions because I told people “don’t get one of these, but if you’re not going to listen to me, for the love of glob make sure it’s vented.”
Anyway, yeah no way anyone should have these except electronics enthusiasts. Even with locking rings, they can just start firing if the person using it isn’t super careful. Nice batteries rated for 30a pulse are 2USD more than the garbage batteries that love to vent or explode.
You add in a transistor, that’s not gonna do anything. You add in a couple more things for protection and your cost is higher than it would have been by getting one of the chips in OP’s article, and you don’t have a nice interface for adjusting wattage and checking battery level and charging via USB and all that fun shit.
Disclaimer: I don’t smoke anything, so I don’t know any details.
Wouldn’t a button connected to a heating coil be a fire hazard? Is there no automatic shut-off based on temperature? If you add enough safety features, it might end up costing about the same as an embedded SoC.
All it would need is a thermal fuse/cutoff, like those in portable heating appliances (air fryers, grills etc.). I wonder what’s needed to include a 10 second on & 30 seconds disabled timer, maybe it’s cheaper
I wonder what’s needed to include a 10 second on & 30 seconds disabled timer, maybe it’s cheaper
555 timer and a transistor or two, I think?
Digipart is showing me price for PY32F002B with a minimum purchase of 5000 as less that $0.10 (not the factory price, just the cheapest store).
The price for the cheapest NE555 (random manufacturer implementation of a 555) variant in Digipart is $0.13
(Granted, you also need at least a crystal and 2 caps, plus 1 power filtering cap per power line for the microcontroller, but those are all cheap)
It’s ridiculous how modern microcontrollers are so stupidly cheap that even though they can run a lot more digital logic (in the form of software running in them) they almost always beat using older and much simpler digital parts even for something as simple as this.
Even microprocessors are getting stupidly cheap: somebody recently pointed me out the Allwinner F1C100s, which is about the smallest microprocessor that can run Linux, and it costs $2 in bulk to the point that some embedded engineer has made a business card with one running Linux which he just gives away.
Economies of scale have been doing really funky things to chip prices, then. Yet another demonstration that the universe Does Not Make Sense.
They also do some BMS stuff, and some support limited graphics and UI. Depedns on the moddle
An RC circuit charging up to some threshold voltage. You can even make it adjustable with a variable resistor.
You’re 100% correct. I have mechanical vapes—no safety cutoff, just an 18650 in a conductive tube with wire coils attached to posts. They’re amazing, and they’re extremely dangerous. Turning one into a protected vape with basic features like wattage adjustment? Way cheaper and easier to go SoC!
i disagree with the single transistor. overcharge prevention requires something more (i am not a batteriologist don’t ask me what. i’d do it with a tesla coil because that’d look cooler)
I was assuming it was disposable (as so many are) and therefore no charging circuit.
Huh. The disposables I am occasionally “forced” to get (put it in a 510 thread gramma) have charging ports. I usually have to charge once or twice to get through the full gram.
That being said, the good local dispo just rebranded and gave me a bunch of 510 batteries with the old name on them. These batteries are fantastic and look about the same size as the server in the article
There is a little more to it, pressing the button 5 times turns it on and off. Three times often lets one cycle through power settings. But yeah, anything more than a very minimal programming is frankly suspicious.
It could be a lot is used to get the charge right idk.
Well the PY32F002B (costing a few cents) even though it has a 32-bit (entry level) ARM core @ 24MHz is literally cheaper than older and less powerful microcontrollers.
Granted, if you don’t do anything else than react to a push button it’s still cheaper to use discrete electronic components than a microcontroller, but given that this device has a LiPo battery (meaning there’s battery control involved) and judging by the picture a USB-C connector, there’s probably a bit more digital logic in it, by which point a 3 cent microcontroller plus a cheap SMD crystal and some caps is cheaper than using discrete components.
The domain of embedded systems has evolved to the point that it’s the best option for almost everything in consumer electronics, mainly because at the lower end there are so many stupidly cheap and easy to use choices were you don’t run an OS in it but instead just a single block of single-threaded code directly on the bare metal accessing registers directly.
It’s crazy to think that this is basically more powerful than the Apollo Guidance Computer that got people onto the moon. It costs 3 cents, and we use it for shit like this and then throw it away. What spectacular waste.
Temperature control, likely something to keep track of how much is left in the device, and I’m betting I’m forgetting something.
I doubt discreet electronics can cut it at that point.
Yeah, as per the analysis I did in another post, even a 555 and a couple of transistors to just blink an LED is more expensive than putting a microcontroller like this one there.
It’s so you can have a spinny animation when you hit the button.
that’s more powerful than my first computer
can it play Grover Teaches Typing?
Yeah, ZX81, 1k RAM lol
There were couple series of: full lcd screen, bt connected to smartphone for notifications and a speaker versions. Plus the rechargeable battery and usb c charging port (obviously).
It was selling about 35 bucks.
Forgot the game one: had controller buttons and 3 games: pacman, tetris and a lying shooter inbuilt. With full lcd and speaker. (Thus wasnt bt connected tho) Price was similar.Forgot the phone one too. Or was it a phone “case” ?
Reusing them, even in small experimental projects, underscores a broader sustainability opportunity.
Bigger opportunity would be banning this shit.
outright bans just allow black markets to flourish. harm reduction and public safety campaigns would go much further
We wouldn’t be banning vaping, we’d be banning disposable vapes.
As someone who vapes quite a bit, I would genuinely love to see this. Disposables are an absolute shitshow and never should have existed in the first place.
Seriously. I struggle to fathom how running out for disposables is even slightly more convenient than refilling a proper tank every so often and replacing the coil. It tastes better, lasts longer and makes much less waste.
I think it’s the marketing of it. A decent amount of people I’ve talked to genuinely don’t know that there’s a reusable option. This also changed when the tobacco industry got involved. Vaping used to have more of a culture of cessation. It was talked about how you could transition from cigs at a higher nicotine level, then bring it down until you’re vaping zero nic, then quit that. I barely hear anyone talk about the quitting pipeline anymore. I don’t think it’s an accident, I think it’s intentional.
Edit: I also think it’s the fact that you only have to buy one thing, and the 3 things (device, coils, juice) aren’t available in every gas station like disposables are. And the user experience - open the box and it starts right up, no refills, all it needs is a charge once in a while. People are really fucking lazy, by nature. But the cost of all those conveniences is indebted tenfold upon the environment, as destruction and waste.
I can’t argue with that. I started to preemptively keep myself OFF of cigs (entire family smokes and I knew I would eventually pick up the habit). For a while now, most of the talk around it I’ve heard is just whether or not it’s cool or cringe rather than how it can be used to quit smoking.
Maybe the disposables wouldn’t be so egregious if you could keep the battery like you used to be able to and just replace the disposable tanks. I think that’s what bothers me the most. We had an okay system before that wasn’t really complicated and wasn’t NEARLY as wasteful.
you’ve not met humans before ?
Vapes should never have existed? Smoking rates and nicotine addiction were finally going down… Then the good old invention of the vape brings it rocketing back again.
This, cartridges make me feel dirty, let alone wasting a entire li-ion cell too.
There are some shops that will actually collect the vapes and send them back to the manufacturer for recycling. But it’s less common than it used to be, which frustrates me to no end, it should be the reverse if anything.
we should ban all forms of smoking
I’m sure that’d go over well.
There also has already been someone that made a home battery from batteries harvested from disposable vapes.
It is absolutely insane that these “disposable” vapes are legal.
they made it harder to get pods and liquid for normal vapes compared to these, and because most ppl by these they primarily stock them
why does a glorified heater connected to a battery need any silicon attached to it?
It’s probably cheaper and simpler to modify (say you suddenly want it to turn on when you click 3 times) to use a 0.1€ chip than to figure out how to do it and build it with discrete components.
20 years ago I was all “computer (chips) can do everything! We can use them everywhere! Replaceable, reprogrammable, fantastic!”
And no one cared.
Now they are everywhere and it’s just a fucking mess 😔
Maybe 20 years from now the EU will have forced standards onto everything and you can (again) fix your dishwasher (and start it from work!!1!).
probably more expensive to make different mechanical components when a simple chip does it all for cheaper. how ev are cheaper than ice cars,
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As a manufacturer/seller of disposable vapes, literally everyone wants refillable tanks.
Obviously the customer does too but we’re vertically integrated. We grow, extract, flavor, fill, and sell. Managing the logistics from China sucks and requires a decent amount of overbuying to ensure we have a steady stream. You never know when some orange retard will close up the border to x country that makes your stuff.
I’d love to just have a CoA of the distillate, flavor mixer like a coke machine, and a fill nozzle for the customer to hand to the cashier to fill.
What happened to vaping?
I specifically remember refillable vaping was exactly what you had when you vaped. You had the battery unit or a “mod” as it was called, on top of that you screwed a tank that had the coils, cotton and liquid, all that shit could be individually replaced and everybody had their own frankensteins combination of mod tank and other peripherals they liked to use.
Why did that stop being a thing in favor of these absurdly wasteful disposable pens?
Not sure what they’re implying about being forced to sell non refillable vapes. I bought a Centaurus kit (refillable) two years ago and they’re still selling. Though the same brand also has lines of disposables…
In reality the people buying disposables don’t want to deal with the hassle that is e-juice (and changing coils). But the modern refillables are pretty good at not leaking every time you look at them wrong, though in my experience the big ones still don’t like being upside down.
Yeah I’ve still got some of mine somewhere. I think the main reason the disposables took the market was partly that they are much cheaper, and partly that many people think they taste better. In my country the government has mandated that they be rechargable and have the flavour thingies replaceable, so they are, but they still seem to get thrown away a lot.
At the early days we had just that. I bought vegetable glycerine, nicotine and some flavour we were set.
…commodified cannabis is garbage and distillate is hotdog water, though
In my mind, nothing with a circuit board is disposable. Pains me to see it.
But can it run DOOM?
You can run Doom on a literal potato
But not on a Neo Geo!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f1-7c6WX10
TL;DW - the Neo Geo has a uniquely bad architecture for FPS games making them nearly impossible to get working on the console.
I have seen people run Doom on a pregnancy test, and you are telling me that the Neo Geo can’t run it!?
That video is a hoax. It’s a small screen inserted into a pregnancy test, cables run out the side which is never brought into frame.
It seems since I have made this post that a huge amount of progress has been made in getting FPS games running on the neogeo.
The positive pregnancy test still runs Doom if you are a teenager or a dude with a mistress
That’s being changed, however, as a bunch of determined devs are using raycasting to go around the console’s limitations, being heavily optimized to run SNK’s arcade titles.
I hope someone accomplishes it, even if it’s single digit framerate.
He updated the video a few hours ago saying that some genius accomplished that
Disclaimer: I didn’t actually watch the video, only saw the thumbnail on my feed
I’m curious who your sole downvoter was. Was it a potato producer that dislikes gaming ? Perhaps a lemon farmer who feels their fruit could run doom on 4k. Was it someone who purchased a $5000 dollar rig only to find out they could have bought a singular potato? I guess we’ll never know
Probably
Skyrim port for it when?
Right after porting Doom.
Will it run OG Doom?
This is the new, “Will it blend?” question.
I don’t get those pieces of crap. There were these fancy electric cigarettes years ago, using those 3.7V rechargeable batteries. Custom designs (saw lightsaber designs), custom liquids, repairable, no e-waste. What is wrong with people to use those crapsticks? And why do those dumbnuts don’t get that these things are e-waste not residual waste?
Instead of asking why people are buying disposables, ask why nobody is buying those reusable vapes. These disposable companies must be doing quite a few things better if people are willing to throw away money and tech.
Price.
That is what they do better.
Many many MANY people would sooner buy something for 5 dollars 20 times then something for $100 once whether financial necessity or not feeling guilty for buying the super expensive thing.
Not to mention people being too lazy to want to do even basic maintenance. Also companies that prefer to sell something people need to keep buying over and over might not offer a longer term version.
Not vaping or even disposable, but my manscaped face trimmer, which is supposedly a higher end one, was the first electric trimmer I’ve gotten that didn’t come with a little bottle of lube and the instructions even said “you don’t need to lube this!” Knowing that they hadn’t changed the laws of physics, I lubed it anyways and I’m convinced that’s the only reason it hasn’t permanently seized up by now because even with the lube and a full charge, there have been times where it didn’t want to start going without a good tap after turning it on.
IMO it’s quality for the price more than just price, I’ve bought and used so many brands of refillable pods/tank mods and they always have quality problems that just don’t happen with the disposables. For anyone that’s experienced them, all I have to say is e-juice leakage.
They are too lazy to refill a pod, and replace a pod - not even a coil.
They dont want to bother, and that’s too complicated and they would just loose it anyway - better to buy those throwaway ones.
These are the most common excuses.Ads and influencers pushing them.
24 MHz Arm Cortex M0+ processor. The chip also carried 24KB of flash storage and 3KB of static RAM.
… a 10y old phone can barely load Google, and this is about 100x slower.
Wild that you can serve anything with that hardware. Granted, static websites are basically just sending files over the wire.
The webpage he hosted was a copy of his own blog post explaining the hack. It just about fit into the 20KB of available flash storage.
We can infer that on every request, the whole static page needs to be spooled out of flash onto RAM (in chunks no larger than 3k), then sent out over Ethernet.
That’s an awful lot of work for the chip. I’m not surprised at all that it errors out under heavy load. The request queue probably grows until it collides with the buffer that bucket brigades the web page to the network.
I’m afraid to look up what optimizations were necessary to get that level of performance. It’s damned impressive work.
Ah, but what if you string together 100 of these as a cluster? Now u get a whole 2Mb of flash storage!
The overall hardware package is in the same ballpark as an Arduino (25% less storage, but better processor and RAM), and people put servers on those . . . well, I won’t say “all the time”, but it isn’t an uncommon project, either.
I wonder if anyone’s ever bootstrapped Forth on one of these vapes—given that there are implementations <512b for other arches, it should fit—and then you could program on it directly rather than flashing machine code compiled elsewhere.
(The issue with 10-year-old phones on Google is that Google isn’t designed for low-end hardware anymore. It’s overloaded with scripts, styles, and other things that aren’t necessary for doing its job. Present a ten-year-old phone with a page with no client-side script and restrained styling, and I’d bet it would do fine.)
Next up, turning these into AI web scraper bots!
/pleasedon’tdothis
OK, but can it run Doom?
x86 at 25MHz could barely run it. This is ARM at 24.
Also 3KB of RAM. That has to be too little.
Yeah, I think I had 2-4MB, but it was a long time ago, so I could be mistaken.
It also had an FPU addon, which I don’t think the M0 has.
When I was a kid we had a 386-33MHz with 4MB RAM, it ran Doom at about 1-2FPS. Upgraded to a 486 DX (66MHz I think?) and 8MB RAM and it ran great on that. It’s possible that the 386 would have been fine if we put more RAM in though, I think the biggest issue was swapping.
Set it to low quality and hit Ctrl+Minus until the window is the size of a postage stamp and it’s buttery smooth.
People got it running on a pregnancy test once, so…
To clarify, it wasn’t running on the pregnancy test, it was just outputting to one.
And the screen had been replaced… so it was truly pointless.
Lmao, I didn’t know that part. Yeah, at that point who fucking cares. 😂
Came here looking for this question
But does it run doom?
