There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
blog.jgc.org
blog.jgc.org
To put into context: this is 3x the ROM/RAM of the ZX81 home computer of the early 1980s. The ARM M0 processor does full 32-bit multiplication in hardware, versus the Z80 that doesn't even offer an 8-bit multiply instruction. If we look at some BASIC code doing soft-float computation, as was most common at the time, the execution speed is about 3 orders of magnitude faster, while the cost of the processor is 2 - 3 orders of magnitudes less. What an amazing time we live in!
Now that it is a pity that when people talk about saving the planet everyone keeps rushing to dispoable electronics, what serves me to go by bycicle to work, be vegetarian, recicle my garbage, if everyone is dumping tablets, phones and magnificient thin laptops into the ground, and vapes of course.
Yet, I still need to wait about 1 second (!) after each key press when buying a parking ticket and the machine wants me to enter my license plate number. The latency is so huge I initially thought the machine was broken. I guess it’s not the chip problem but terrible programming due to developers thinking they don’t need to care about performance because their chip runs in megahertz.
"Key presses are 15x slower than they should be" gets labelled P5 low priority bug report, whereas "New AI integration to predict lot income" is P0 must-fix because on Tuesday a sales guy told a potential customer that it'd be in the next version and apparently the lead looked interested so we're doing it.
When the device is new this is an absurd amount of time to wait. As the device degrades over 10, 20 years, that programming will keep it working the same. Awful the entire time, yes, but the same as the day it was new.
If you keep your finger on the touchscreen for just long enough, it helpfully repeats the keystroke while you're entering a license plate.
Given the inevitable hardware issues, this means that what should be a single tap frequently becomes a burst of identical characters.
The programmers who worked on this probably would've liked to be game developers instead.
Besides the fact that scanning a barcode seems beyond much of the general population, they do it so sloooow.
Gently forcing the individual to choose sapient or insentient.
Just one recent example: few months ago, I replaced a Bosch dishwasher with the latest version of the same model. Now, when I press the start button to initiate the cycle, it takes over 3 seconds for it to register! Like, what is going on in that 3 seconds?
How was it possible that even 'kind of good' developers like me were able todo much more with much less back in the 90s? My boss would be like, "Here's this new hardware thingy and the manual. Now figure out how to do the impossible by Monday." Was it because we had bigger teams, more focus, fewer dependencies?
Maybe that ticket machine was coded in MicroPython. /s
The same market forces that gave us affordable electric vehicles gave us disposable vapes.
If it goes anything like plastic bottles, there will be a bitter fight for corporate accountability that goes nowhere. It’s especially difficult here because there isn’t a single monopoly like Coca-cola to hold responsible. What is the bottle bill equivalent for vapes?
Bicycling, transit usage, and switching to lower-carbon food sources significantly reduces your CO2 footprint. Your example influences others in your community, though it may not be personally apparent.
Given that the moon lander had a 1Mhz processor and 4kb of ram means we landed on the moon with the compute power of a Vape or USB cable. Wild times indeed.
Vapes are probably made in enough quantity to warrant custom silicon. Then the mosfets and charge circuit could be on the same die. It could be mounted COB (black blob).
They could probably use a single 'microphone' (pressure sensor) and determine which setting based on a photodiode.
The PCB's could be replaced with a flex PCB which integrates the heating elements (Vegetable Glycerine boils at 290C, whereas Polyimide can do 400C for a short while). Construction of the whole device can then involve putting the PCB inside the injection moulding machine for the cavities, eliminating all assembly steps, joints and potential leaks, and reducing part count
Not when the MCUs might cost a penny and the other parts aren’t much more.
Putting high power electronics and analog into the same custom silicon as a custom digital logic is nontrivial. They’re made on different processes.
The cheapest variety is a tiny PCB built into the microphone. It's three wires for the battery and heater, and that's it. Sometimes they include a cheap and nasty battery charger. All in a single grain of sand for almost free.
There's two limiting factors for 'smart dust': power (batteries are the majority weight and volume of this vape), and antennae (minimum size determined by wavelength of carrier wave).
I believe you can fit an NFC module in a 5x5mm package, but that does externalize the power supply.
Maybe the smart dust will have to eat microbes and stuff to stay active.
As for communication, we can’t go shoving antennas in them as then they’d be larger than dust. And you can’t use the optical part of the spectrum because of interference with basically everything. You can’t use wavelengths smaller either as you get into UV and high radiation. There is the terahertz radio spectrum [0] between 3mm and 30um that is pretty open and not utilized at all because we haven’t figured out how to make good transmitters. Plus the spectrum isn’t very useful as it isn’t very penetrating and water vapor absorbs it… and it requires lots of power.
Smart dust might have to be more of a distributed computer or something. Or a micro machine that uses chemistry and mechanical magic to do its operations.
RFID is historically powered by one of three methods,
one of which is completely wireless/battery-free.
I am now wondering if it's possible to put a ZX81 emulator on one of these microcontrollers. It would need to emulate the Z80 but you've got plenty of spare cycles, and 3x the ROM and RAM of the original, so enough space for a small emulator!
It's all integrated on a tiny PCB mounted to the back of the microphone.
It’s beautiful, I love it.
Especially since both the waste created in the process of making the device and the e-waste created with it's disposal are somebody else's problem!
When computers become disposable, their programmers soon become disposable as well. Maybe, you shouldn't love it.
So, probably enough to land on the moon. And cheap enough to justify a dozen backups.
Is that inflation adjusted? If not, the real cost difference is even starker.
So you end up with something that could probably be coaxed into running DOOM at playable FPS (if it had enough RAM and a display) relegated to running a humble - and frankly objectionably wasteful (coupled with questionable health outcomes with long term use) - disposable vape.
LCSC says between 6 and 8 cents in volume:
https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/C5292058.html
500+ $ 0.0802 2,500+ $ 0.0727 5,000+ $ 0.0682"
Cheap for a 1980s computer, now pennies. Wild.
I feel like, pioneers of the past would be rather disappointed with us.
I mean, primarily we're not using this ridiculous power to solve actual problems, but to enslave one another in addiction, mindless consumption and manufactured consent to a lesser life.
Almost 100 years later, now with computer enabled misinformation and agitation campaigns by tech oligarchs, a new fascism is on the rise and Alan Turing would be called an abomination, again.
These things should have 100 times the deposit amount of a can of soda with mandatory requirements for retailers to take the 'empties' back.
Everybody makes fun of paper straws. Or they made fun of wind power when it was barely 0.1% of energy production. Why not immediately demand 20 years ago that all single use plastic is banned? Or that only wind and solar are allowed? Because the step is too big, it would not be accepted. You need to take one step at a time.
That's even a viable strategy against procrastination. There is this big daunting task. So much to do! Oh my, better scroll a little tiktok first. No, just take a small first step of the task. Very small, no big commitment. Then maybe do some tiktok, but the little first step won't be too much. Result is, you have an immediate sense of accomplishment and actually made progress, maybe even stay hooked with more steps of the ultimately big task.
Yeah, we had that. Glass milk bottles and coke bottles and bulk goods sold out of barrels by the lb rather than in plastic bags.
But then plastic took off and soon after Big Sugar paid a PR/lobbying firm to run a campaign with a fake Indian crying a single tear and calling every Tom Dick and Harry a “litterbug” and now the pile of garbage is our fault, not the manufacturers.
The collection mandatorily happens in the shops that sell electronic devices, you don't have to return them to the exact store where it was purchased, as long as they sell similar devices they cannot refuse to take it back (without paying anything more). It works pretty well, even if shop owners/workers aren't always pleasant when you return something.
[1] https://www.erecycling.ch/en/privatpersonen/blog/vRB-Vorgezo...
Any items found by garbage program will be collected and returned to manufacturer at cost.
All items sold in country must be identifiable for this purpose. Importers are considered the manufacturers and must retrofit products.
Then we would be getting closer to capturing the total burden to society.
A lot of people wouldn’t want this because it’s asking for stuff to become more expensive for them.
Every bit of plastic humans have made still exits, bar a small amount we have burnt.
That’s concerning.
Also many countries collect disposable plastic.
I'm not kidding :)
This guy[1] explains the problem quite well.
Taxing waste is one part of the story but it's actually a really good thing that vaping is cheaper than smoking so this can only go so far before it's counterproductive.
I think the answers lie in stuff like banning sale of pre-filled ones. If you make people buy a separate bottle of nicotine liquid (and you enforce that this is quite a large minimum size, like we already do with tobacco) and fill the device up before they use it, I think they are much more likely to refill it when it's empty and recharge it when it's dead.
Maybe another thing could be restricting points of sale. I bet a lot of the waste comes from drunk people buying them at 10pm in the corner shop near the pub. If you make people plan ahead that might also help.
I think a better thing to do may be to try to embed disposal costs into the price of the original product. That changes prices to hopefully incentivise reuse.
For example Germany, while the country is famous for the whole splitting the garbage, I am still waiting after 20 years to see the kitchen oil recycling recipients as we have in Portugal.
As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in place, and human nature is as such that hardly anyone will drive to the next recycling center to deliver a single device that broke down, or call the city hall to collect it.
We should go back to the old days, when electronics were repairable, which naturally companies will lobby against, as that will break down the capitalistic curve of exponential growth in sales.
In Dutch Mediamarkt, the same company as Saturn in Germany I believe, they have bins for electric devices.
I Portugal there is Rede Electrão. You can deposit those devices in a lot of supermarkets, stores and fire stations.
Because German environmental policy is about virtue signalling to keep the plebs busy, not solving environmental problems. Nuclear power plants replaced by coal and natural gas, obsession with recycling but nothing done about disposable packaging, car regulations and city design dictated for decades by the car manufacturing lobby, combustion engine limits/bans only when said manufacturers thought they could get on the Tesla gravy train and subsequently rolled back when reality became apparent, it just goes on.
If there were a deposit scheme of say five bucks a piece, I'd wager you'd see >80% return rates with every purchase.
Addictions exists. To stop smoking is HARD. Nicotine addition us on par with benzos, prescription opiates or amphetamines.
It's not profitable to recycle small electronic devices otherwise you'd see heaps of shops doing it. It's toxic, hazardous and labour intensive.
100 times the deposit amount would be like $5-10 USD per-device which is insane. I do agree that any retailers should be required to take back empties and dispose of them responsibly.
Sounds like they should be banning their sale and/or production then, just like many jurisdictions have been with plastics and other non-recyclable items. These devices are not an essential-to-life item where the waste produced is justifiable, especially when you consider the LiPo batteries, which are a borderline-environmental disaster from the moment the lithium is mined to the day that battery finds its way to a landfill. Why single-use disposable vaping devices exist in the first place is somewhat perplexing given permanent/re-fillable ones are also available, often right beside the disposable ones, and generally offer a significantly lower cost of ownership.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62vk0p5dn5o
Trash compactors break the batteries in these things. A deposit could help to ensure that the vapes are disposed responsibly.
Other option: Add an "electronics" bin everywhere. Though that would be more expensive and less clear how effective it would be.
Here's a slightly old investigation finding 40% of ewaste being shipped off to china: https://www.ban.org/news-new/2016/9/15/secret-tracking-proje...
you can choose to either vape a flavour version only, or one containing a certain amount of nicotine
Looking at this device it feels like it shouldn't be hard to have a reusable base with battery and electronics, and a disposable capsule that attaches on top but is replaceable.
Someone imported it, someone's selling it in the stores.
If the price of the "disposable" is, say, £5, make the deposit £50. Suddenly all the vapes will end up back at the retailer.
And make sure retailer has the financial incentive to return the used disposables and that's it.
I'm confident the lawmakers have been bribed to refuse to tackle the problem, otherwise how you can explain minimum price on plastic bags but tolerating toxic landfill fires and staggering waste of lithium (recycling will inevitably br fixed soon).
Yeah, the deposits for cans are a bit stupid: people already widely recycle aluminum (and scrap metals in general) purely for commercial reasons. No need for extra regulation there like mandatory deposits.
I've lived in places with no deposits and there is much much much more littering compared to places having deposits on every types of metal/plastic beverage containers
Many daily life, single use objects have a lot of thoughts put into them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj0ze8GnBKA
Is this person really brave, or just unaware of the risks?
https://www.lumafield.com/article/finding-hidden-risks-in-th...
It seems almost absurd to what length humanity has gone just to satisfy it's primitive needs.
IMO this is as much a "we are hopelessly dumb monkeys who just want to satisfy ourselves" as as it is "there's clever monkeys who know and exploit our monkey weaknesses so they can make more money."
I imagine these same types of people with similar tendencies would be regulated and mitigated by their peers more in the past. Say something like 200 years ago, you might be intelligent and cunning enough to gain power in a community, but it would never mean what it can mean today. The scaling factors are literally beyond comprehension. The accumulation of power, the modes of deception or concealment, sheer scale, all of it... It's too much for people to really track anymore, and it can continue largely unfettered in so many cases.
All that is to say yes, I think a tremendous number of people are being unwittingly exploited. The attention land-grab is arguably the most obvious battle field, but there are certainly others.
- build these vapes and sell them for a few dollars? - tear down an entire house, rebuild a new one from scratch, and sell it? - ship things all the way across the entire freakin ocean instead of manufacturing them locally? - mine cryptocurrency?
To me the answer is always fossil fuels. We stumbled on an energy source so dense (at first, seemingly) infinite that it just wildly increased the amount of energy we can use. For most of human history our greatest constraint was energy, then that constraint was just blown the fuck off.
I feel like our whole society is riding a high of cheap energy. We attribute so much progress to things like science and democracy and great thinkers and revolutionaries. But how much of it was really just fossil fuels and nitrogen fixing??
--source, my butt.
Most likely a promotional from the looks of it. I myself stumbled over it a about a year ago, when someone posted it on an IRC channel.
Later at 6:45 they show more people testing them
That said, it wouldn’t surprise me if he does it all day long, 6 days per week.
https://www.ft.com/content/f72f17e4-a83d-4494-b1e7-a349cc7ae...
Kids don't have to hide proof of their consumption in their bedroom (well at least until they are hooked enough they can't spend a night without vaping). They buy, consume and throw away before reaching home.
Wait, what? Where's the sense in that?
Nicotine policy and policing has been a clusterf - not only are there wasteful disposable vapes everywhere, but a thriving black market that has lead to firebombings and murders.
In fact, nicotine habits can be harder to kick than heroin. I know plenty of people who have tried to kick nicotine many times and cannot stay off of it.
Anyway, it's moot, because outright banning tobacco is insane.
You can't "just ban" it or "ban it properly". You would get a very nasty black market and things with such ban.
Doesn't seem to have stopped kids getting their vapes yet I need to import my cannabis vape via the black market.
I don't think the post you're responding to is saying that vapes should be banned. Just disposable ones.
I too am agnostic but do not understand this reasoning. BTW let me get severely downvoted by saying that if alcohol prohibition came up for a vote I'd vote yes in a heartbeat.
It reduced the amount of people who drank and it increased health. It increased safety for women and children and reduced violent crime on the streets and in the home. It reduced alcohol related diseases and death. People missed less work. Like with passive smoking, a ban on alcohol positively affects non-drinkers too.
It was the organised crime side effects and societal unpopularity which lead to it's "failure". Alcohol prohibition continues to work in some countries today but I wouldn't want to live there.
Ultimately it's a bio-ethics and freedom issue, issues that continue to raise their head from time to time here and there, e.g. coronavirus responses.
Control of vaping could also be classed in this category.
It doesn't stop addicts from craving and it doesn't curb the appeal of the product. People who think tobacco/nicotine bans would work are people who think they don't have any positive effect associated with them.
People don't smoke because the evil cigarette companies tricked them and now they are addicted. It's a drug, it feels good to do it.
A tobacco/nicotine ban will end up exactly like aby other recreational drug prohibition.
I've even seen 15-16 year old boys in Thailand pick up their girlfriends on motorbikes, race their friends to the food court, drink a couple of beers and vape once they get there, then ride their girlfriends home again while still under the influence, all without helmets mind you.
My home country (India), and others (Singapore, others?) have outright banned all electronic cigarettes which is a regulation I hate. I acknowledge that vapes reduce barriers to entry to kids. This is partly solvable in countries with strong governance.
But disposables? Ban that shit
The issue is that to the end user this is still tangibly the same product - and mostly gets treated in much the same way as the original "disposable" vapes.
https://www.unodc.org/LSS/Announcement/Details/8afbc6e8-9439...
The truth is you can mix your own vape juice from just PG, VG and nicotine. Which are completely harmless to eat (except nicotine) and used in food products. A more rational discussion would be about if inhaling PG and VG is harmful to the lungs, or the additional unregulated stuff you find in flavoring of vape juice.
Or we think so unless proven otherwise.
I fully support banning these things. It's impossible to regulate effectively without.
And this is before we get into dealing with the battery -- which has its own set of risks.
(One of the early sources of funding for MyNewt development was a company that made vapes. Though not disposable ones if I remember correctly).
Also, the MCUs they use are very cheap. They are cheaper than having lots of specialized discrete electronics.
I talked to someone who worked on developing vapes and they spent much, if not most, of their engineering on safety-related issues. They may be an outlier. The reason I remember is because I was surprised how dangerous these devices really are if you get things wrong.
As a software engineer with some hardware experience, I would never use a vape. It strikes me as way too risky. Much for the reason you point out: the companies probably don't care more than they are forced to by regulations.
I have a huge old microwave on the blocks next. After that a series of small odd ball electronic toys and a few early LED bulbs. If I ever come across a vape, I'm sure it'll make its way on to the shelf.
With regards to vapes, just look on the ground near a sidewalk. I find like 3 or 4 big depleted vapes a day in a US urban area. Closer to 15 or 20 in greater London in the UK.
There are a lot of fun parts inside microwaves (a personal favorite is the high-torque-low-speed-line-voltage motor, which I use to make creepy Halloween decorations) but the caps, transformer, and magnetron are all useful for somewhat... more dangerous... pursuits.
As far as I can tell, this is an urban legend. No consumer microwave oven has ever used beryllium in its magnetron insulators. Military radar ones, yes (and likely where the legend started.) Some specialist test equipment and RF transmitters too, and they all contain prominent warnings of it. Besides its toxicity, it's far more expensive than regular alumina.
Weren't disposable vapes banned in UK in May 2025? Is the problem still that big?
"One man's trash is another man's treasure."
You want to make vaping even more addictive than it already is?
Basically the weapons from "High on Life" or the butter robot from Rick and Morty, but as a vape.
Which 10 Cent Microcontroller is Right for You? Comparing the CH32V003 to the PY32F002A.
He dramatically revealed that they were no longer selling tobacco, but rather "Nicotine as a service"
Needless to say, I decided not to work for a merchant of death
It's so curious why these things are addictive. Before I tried a vape (it was called an e-cigarette back then) I thought the addictive thing about cigarettes is the nicotine. That's part of it, but a huge part (possibly even bigger) is just the sensation of sucking in smoke/vapour from a little stick and exhaling it. Is it similar to sucking on a mother's teat or something? It really seems to satisfy in a way nothing else does.
In the UK truly disposable vapes are banned, thankfully, but I do wonder if it's now just "technically refillable" ones that people use one time. They should be taxed to the eyeballs to encourage reuse if so.
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/15/hosting-a-website-on-a-dispo...
> Nicotine in tobacco can form carcinogenic tobacco-specific nitrosamines through a nitrosation reaction. This occurs mostly in the curing and processing of tobacco. However, nicotine in the mouth and stomach can react to form N-nitrosonornicotine, a known type 1 carcinogen, suggesting that consumption of non-tobacco forms of nicotine may still play a role in carcinogenesis
Cancer risk is more complex than just carcinogens. Nicotine is known to promote the growth of existing cancer cells, and in multiple ways. A big thing with cancer that not many people are aware of is that we all have cancer cells, and get new cancer cells all the time — but that the human immune system is normally effective at detecting and killing them before they have multiplied too much. Old cancer mutations can lay dormant or kept in check for many years, but if promoted and/or the immune system gets stressed or suppressed, they'd grow and you'd "get cancer".
Different types of E-juice also contain additives for flavour, and we still don't yet know the long-term effects of some of those — when ingested as vape — which is a different to being swallowed. And by long-term, I mean 20 years or more, which in some cases is the time a cancer cell can take from formation to detectable tumour.
Presence of the Carcinogen N′-Nitrosonornicotine in Saliva of E-cigarette Users: <https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemrestox.8b00089>
https://www.unodc.org/LSS/Announcement/Details/8afbc6e8-9439...
I also found it interesting that the mouthpiece position would be detected with microphones rather than any other electronic sensors.
Edit: https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/
When herbal vapes for cannabis came in around 5-10 years ago, it was the catalyst that started all this. Pax are the main manufacturer of these disposable vapes and one of the first on the scene to push THC following with nicotine. These were originally expensive, bulky and seen as an luxury item. I bought one, an DeVinci Ascent, I loved it.
I used it to hide that I was smoking cannabis from my parents and all the opportunities to walk the families dog and get high were wasted by playing CS:S and getting high. Teenage-hood for you.
Coil driven vapes are a different ball-game. Require actual human intervention and know-how. They are refillable in a sensible way, coils need replacing and I've seen some very cool rigs.
A USB port is pointless if you know that the user isn't going to refill the cart. If you can produce the device cheaply and not get taxed for the environmental waste. Add the R&D costs, additional safety, additional materials for the tank. What do you do with the now empty toxic tank? There are additional costs for stocking vape shops to refill the liquid. The latter is a more sustainable business option than the former.
They know the playbook. They would much prefer for you to be out with mates, stop off at a newsagents, pick up some chemical brain-rotting Dragon Soup and grab an elf-bar. Act like a twat outside of the venue and then throw it on the ground. Anything to do with vaping is foul-play. The Alcohol biz is tightly knitted with the vape/smoking biz.
Disposable also gives you plausible deniability. They get in trouble, close up shop. Relabel their brand and start again.
Use regular vapes with e-juice
Also, it's fun to imagine someone building whole racks of these (e.g. recycled ones) for a computation farm. Or a cheap home server, whatever.
Yes, there are even videos showing it on youtube.
Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45252817
At one point in history aluminum and other alloys were considered pretty cutting edge. As was in-house electricity and plumbing. Now, those things are just everyday stuff that gets no special regard.
When you can build disposable computers at scale for pennies, it might not be "tech" anymore in the sense of cutting edge things, and instead it's just "an average Tuesday".
ESP32 has a compute power of a PC from the early '90s (it can run Quake!), in addition to having wireless connectivity you couldn't even buy back then.
It's truly a marvel of anti-scientific thinking.