For these devices the microcontroller needs to be super cheap. Microcontrollers like the Puya PY32 Series (e.g., PY32C642, PY32F002/F030) can cost in the $0.02 - $0.05 range for the kind of many-million volumes applicable for disposable vapes. These are 32-bit ARM Cortex M0 MCUs, running at a 24 MHz clock or similar, some with 24 KB of ROM and maybe 3 KB of RAM!
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!
Which is why when folks nowadays say "you cannot use XYZ for embedded", given what most embedded systems look like, and what many of us used to code on 8 and 16 bit home computers, I can only assert they have no idea how powerful modern embedded systems have become.
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.
> Which is why when folks nowadays say "you cannot use XYZ for embedded", given what most embedded systems look like, and what many of us used to code on 8 and 16 bit home computers, I can only assert they have no idea how powerful modern embedded systems have become.
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.
Be heartened that your choices are meaningful. The impact of e-waste on ground contamination from landfills in the United States and Europe is negligible, and landfill capacity itself does not approach the level of emergency that planetary warming is for human civilizations.
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.
Something I recently found out about ARM Cortex M0s, they are small enough and cheap enough that they get used in USB cables to handle protocol negotiation between devices.
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.
It also stood out to me how little stuff is in there - there's the uC itself, 3 transistors for heating the flavor canisters, an op-amp for the microphones, but other than that I don't really see anything - no external oscillator, no vrm (though a charger/BMS circuit must be in there somewhere).
I see lots more cost-cutting corners they could take...
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
> How close are we to smart dust I wonder? How small can we make wireless communications?
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.
This is exactly it. The tech in these sorts of devices is way overpowered for what they are or need simply because it's a lot cheaper to do it that way than it would be to use more appropriately scaled computing power. Either the "more appropriate" components are no longer in production, or they are in production but are now considered somewhat niche and are only produced in volumes that make them considerably more expensive than the more advanced/powerful options.
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.
For the even cheaper e-cigarettes many vendors are producing dedicaded ASICS integrating heater control, pressure sensing, battery management, for as close to free as it gets. It's astonishing.
It's all integrated on a tiny PCB mounted to the back of the microphone.
The Z80 didn't even do 8 bit add. The ALU operates in two 4 bit cycles.
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!
For my part, I hate anything explicitly labeled "disposable". As the author writes, you're supposed to recycle it, but how many people will do that if it has "disposable" written on it? Even worse, if it was truly disposable they could use a non-rechargeable battery, but because they have to keep up the pretense of it being reusable, they have to include a rechargeable battery with more dodgy chemistry that probably shouldn't end up in a landfill...
It reminds me of how Sussman talked about someday we'd have computers so small and cheap that we'd mix dozens in our concrete and be put throughout our space.
Wow: the Sinclair ZX81 launched in the UK in 1981 for around £49.95 as a kit (£50) and £69.95 assembled, making it incredibly cheap, and later in the US as the Timex Sinclair 1000 for $99.95 (kit) or $149.95 (assembled)
Nowsdays computers misguided us to think that we need to measure RAM in GB and storage in TB. There are a lot of "invisible" applications running on 8bit MCU (not ARM based and more modern than ZX80) and few kB of flash and a bunch of RAM (64 bytes in luxury models). In this context matter more the integrated peripherals like ADC, DAC, PWM, etc that simplify the complexity of board and reduce the total cost.
idea for a hobby project for someone better versed in hw than me - create a computer that can at least run basic with the MCU from the disposable vape.. :)
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.
Why stop there? I think more or less every non-durable product manufacturer (say, lifespan less than 5 years) should be required to take the product back at end of life and dispose of it properly. Trash is an enormous externality. I'm talking about plastic clamshells, container lids, "disposable" storage containers, the lot.
"Why stop there" is often a reason why nothing gets done. Why do small if you can go big right away? Because going big right away is costly (in social cost, in convincing, in how much people need to change behavior, ...) and that prevents people from doing it in the first place because the threshold is high. Apathy is the result. Better to take a small step first, then get used to the measure / the cost, then have a next phase where you do more.
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.
> more or less every non-durable product manufacturer (say, lifespan less than 5 years) should be required to take the product back at end of life and dispose of it properly
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.
Switzerland has something like this for "eWaste", it's called the ARC [1] (Advance Recycling Contribution). For any electronic device you purchase a small tax is collected and used for the recycling and collection of the future waste it will generate.
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.
They should just be banned outright. In no world is this going to end up in bins 100% of the time. Disposable really means it’s destined for the trash at best, and just simply litter at worst.
Yeah ban is the answer. Trouble is that, as shown in the article, even if they include the charging and refilling bits they can be cheap enough to throw away after use.
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 disposable vapes are banned in the U.K. (where I think the author is?) or at least they will be soon. But the non-disposable options end up being cheap enough that they can be disposed of when empty.
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.
Not sure about electronics as a whole, but I was able to recycle (or at least dispose of properly) an inflated old Dell laptop battery at either a Best Buy or a Home Depot (I'd assume it was the former, but they were next to each other so I don't recall). This is in the US.
Maybe Italy is more advanced, you can bring eWaste to the municipal center or to leave to the shop where you are buying a new device. On the street they started to place bin for small eWaste like phones, chargers, keyboards, vape.
> 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.
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.
Based on your reply you haven't fully considered context. Smokers don't care about themselves or else they wouldn't smoke. As demonstrated by the article, you can see proof that they also don't care for the environment. What makes you think people who intentionally pay to kill themselves and then throw the waste on the ground instead of trash will ever recycle?
Why though? Bottles/cans are easily recycled and I believe the small reimbursement is easily recovered during the recycling costs.
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.
> 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.
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.
It's very profitable to recycle small electronics in some economies where thousands of companies do it (eg India or Shenzhen); in countries where human labour is more expensive, it's untenable
I feel like the take it back approach, just ends with the retailer/manufacturer throwing it away anyway.
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.
Who bears the cost of that improvement? Either the manufacturer, the retailer, or the customer. The problem is that the waste created by vapes is a negative externality so there's no incentive to improve their design. Until the government starts requiring safe disposal of these things, we won't see a change. Think about what people used to do with old car oil before new environment protection regulations.
The problem is you can’t find any company willing to recycle them. Because of the nicotine content, I’ve heard e-waste recyclers consider them hazardous waste and refuse to touch them.
yeah, e-waste recyclers suck, they love to ship it all to the 3rd world where piles of circuit boards get tossed in an open fire and stirred by kids to reclaim the metals.
I don't want to advertise for the brand but I bought a disposable "looking" vape today where they split the liquid from the core. So the end result is a very small stick but is actually re-usable and they had a re-cycling digital bin.
> Many countries have deposits for single use bottles/cans [...]
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.
It's much easier to recycle things when everyone participate and bring their trash to a common place.
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
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).
Man. I don't actually know anyone who vapes. I see it in public sometimes and just assumed people refilled them - maybe they do. Seeing him hold some up, seeing all that plastic, metal, electronics, all that Work (Joules) expended, in something that you just dump after a day is nuts. I can't think of anything else like that. Maybe plastic water bottles but they don't have even half the materials or complexity? Maybe I under-estimate how much is put into regular cigarettes or beer & cans.
Refillable vapes used to be the standard around a decade ago, back when a liter of vape base (without nicotine) cost 30€ at max. Disposable vapes pretty much didn't exist. Now the same liter of vape base (still without nicotine) is a "tobacco product" and costs 400€+ due to taxes thanks to decade-long lobbying efforts by big tobacco, turning refillable vapes into a massive niche product due to single-use vapes costing the same or less, without any of the hassle of mixing your own liquids or having to refill them.
A little calibrating correction: A vape should last more than a day unless you're a very heavy user. Around three days with a '700 puffs' one maybe, and a week wouldn't be unheard of.
I mean, naturally there's Doom on a vape [0], so as far as I'm concerned, that box is already ticked. Someone should give a good name to the law that every hardware device with a screen has a Doom port.
Our whole current civilization could be construed as advanced alien tech servicing a humongous tribe of moronic apes.
The fact that one fifth of the internet is dedicated to porn just speaks for itself.
Just thinking about all the tech involved, from the capturing of footage using highly sophisticated camera, to the transmission over kilometers of fiber optics, to the stokage into redundant and consistent databases backed by highly optimized hardware and brilliantly engineered file format, to the distribution to your phone device, which is literally a personal computer that fits in your palm.. all of that just to show porn to satisfy your monkey brain.
It seems almost absurd to what length humanity has gone just to satisfy it's primitive needs.
Let's not forget that with both porn AND all the other "junk food" on social media that we waste away on: there are very smart people getting paid a lot of money to make/keep you hooked on them.
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."
This is an issue I've perceived with technology for a while now. Even a lowly ape like myself can gain disproportionate rewards from using computer technology in ways that many people around me can't. I could use it in constructive or exploitative fashions if I chose to, at scales I could never imagine without it. That has never sat well with me because I know there are people smarter than I am with a lot more resources than I have. And they also have no scruples, so exploitation is in their tool box.
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.
In the past, entire intercontinental trade routes existed just to get food seasoned, so what you’re pointing out isn’t that unusual. The desire for sensual pleasures drives most things (and not only in humans).
I feel like our whacky world is only made possible by fossil fuels. Like why is it profitable to
- 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??
It’s hard to know for sure what’s acceptable when it comes to working conditions in China. The information we get is incredibly limited. Most of what makes it through is propaganda.
That said, it wouldn’t surprise me if he does it all day long, 6 days per week.
They are, there's a video on YouTube you can find where they interview someone with that job and they test 10,000 a day. Then they mention that they go home and vape some more
That’s much less automated than I would have thought. Also the dude vape testing the sticks… I don’t think they are aware they are probably doing more damage than good.
It's not that surprising that a company that sells these awful gadgets to people who don't really care about their own health would behave in such a manner.
I don't smoke/vape, but I saw some pretty absurd models available recently that really piqued my interest. One had a touchscreen, could run some basic apps, and had wifi/bluetooth support. The other had a d-pad + buttons built in and a few ripoffs of classic games you could play. I bought one of each to start ripping them apart on my work bench and playing with the firmware. Unfortunately I got busy and haven't done much more than look at the internals. They're using some sort of cheap smart watch SoC. It's wild you can get a battery, touchscreen, charging circuit, and a microprocessor for like $12.
This shouldn't be surprising since a vape is a safety critical device. Primarily because the temperature control has to be precise and you have to solve a surprisingly large number of control problems that can arise in real life. For instance, if you overshoot the temperature the amount of toxic by-products can increase sharply. You can also cause parts of the vape to disintegrate, and then aspirate things you really do not want in your lungs.
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 think you overestimate how much vape companies care about safety. When there is no liquid left, you just vape smoke from burning cotton (it tastes like burned plastic) on half of these devices. There are checks for this, but they are not that good.
I'm sure most don't care more than regulations require them to care (including making tradeoffs in terms of risks of getting caught, and the chance of actual enforcement). But that doesn't change the fact that it is a safety-critical device. It produces something that interfaces directly with sensitive tissues.
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'd love to see a breakdown of the design and whether or not any of these vapes have any Safety Critical Function considerations, or if they just rely on the mcu for everything and have a ton of single fault risks.
As a smoker who transitioned to vaping, I see immense health benefits.
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.
The issue is that when legislation comes in regarding "disposable" vapes - manufacturers skirt around that by making the fluid chamber a removable pod that can be swapped for others, and a USB-C port for charging the device itself.
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.
You get downvoted because you're implying substances like methamphetamine are common in vapes (as per your linked article), which it obviously is not, and already highly illegal.
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.
The reason disposables are so popular in the US is the FDA banned any flavored cartridges, which doesn't include disposables. The immense battery waste is a direct result of a relatively new law.
That doesn't explain why vapes are so rife elsewhere, particularly the UK. They're popular because, as the FT described, they're the ultimate product. Cool, cheap and addictive.
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.
Did that in Australia - the problem is even worse now. Disposable vapes were a market response to banning and restricting pod vapes (where you can keep the base and just swap out the pod).
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.
Sounds like they didnt ban it properly. There aren't really nicotine junkies like heroin. So I suspect ban nicotine and slowly everyone stops using nicotine sources.
They are straight up banned in Australia but you often see them chucked in the gutters and rivers. Only seems like they started raiding the stores in the last few months.
The vape ban in Australia is utterly stupid though. All vapes are banned, not just disposables, and guess what's easier to discretely sell to kids from a newsagency.
Doesn't seem to have stopped kids getting their vapes yet I need to import my cannabis vape via the black market.
Why do we need to ban these? I'm not trying to be contrarian, but why do some people appear to be for banning tobacco but not alcohol? I don't claim to have all the answers or even strong opinions, but if your going to ban one recreational drug with negative externalities you should ban them all. I'd much rather hear people's opinions then ask AI.
Singapore and AFAIK Thailand banned vapes altogether. And it seems to be actually enforced.
They have completely different grounds for it but still, there's already some movement in this space.
Not. I've seen young teenagers vape in Thailand, that's how enforced it is. They only catch foreigners from whom they can extract thousand-dollar bribes.
They do seem to be banned in an around 10 states at this point though there is some sort of existing stock law or something so if you ask them you still seem to be able to buy them. They don’t seem to be on display anymore though.
I've just started a Salvage Pile in my workshop. Laser printer with fax modem was the first for excision and harvest. I could feel the addiction take hold before the last of the plastic shell was tossed into the refuse bin. The stepper motors alone!
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 the microwave, here’s a token “please safely discharge and double check the cap” comment!
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.
As a second regards the microwave, depending on the age, please be extremely careful about the magnetron the insulators on which could contain beryllium oxide, which can kill you.
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.
I still think the next evolution of these vapes is for a Tamagotchi-esque device to get built into them and to have the pet grow when you inhale through it. You're already walking around with enough tech - why not gamify it more?
In the 70s, the Polaroid SX-70 camera included a disposable battery in every film pack. After 10 shots, you threw away both it and the plastic film case with its large metal spring mechanism. When the film production stopped in the late 00s, you could use 600 film designed for other polaroid bodies reloaded into a 779 native SX70 cartridge, because the battery would last much longer than the initial 10 shots.
Currently working on a method to recycle / repurpose the li-ion cells obtained from the disposable vapes, trying to scale up the recycling effort by releasing products to fund the manpower required to breakdown and sort the vape components . Getting close to releasing the first 100 demo models of the product for stress testing in the wild. Currently based in the greater Seattle area and here is a link to my site if anyone wanted to know more:
https://2ndchancemnd.com/
It feels like we’ve turned every physical object into a distributed system with firmware updates, a network stack, and a failure mode that requires rebooting your house. All that compute just to do the same job the purely mechanical version did for decades, except now it can also crash.
I have used these disposable vapes before, and it saddens me that so much tech (including those batteries!) are just thrown away. Like what ever happened to reducing e-waste.
It's wild to think about the e-waste implications of this. We are effectively throwing away a basic smartphone's worth of complexity and lithium every week.
It being activated by microphones makes me think you could add speakers to this tiny format and make a tiny digital instrument that's influenced by blow intensity etc.
I remember the good old days when a "vape" was just a sturdy housing for a rechargable battery, some heating wire, cotton and juice. The power was determined by the resistance of the coils you built. Those things would last forever.
I can't believe these are legal, especially in countries that supposedly care a lot about the environment and where people are even quite annoying about, for example, only using the "Eco Mode" on household appliances (also known as the "won't clean your dishes" mode, "won't clean your clothes properly" mode...)
That is a lot! But that's also an expensive vape, with way more tech than cheap ones. Here you can get one for ~10 Euro, and they are NOT rechargeable or anything.
I just dont understand disposable vape. It's very easy to convert one into "reuseable": Add a charging port, a cheap li-po charger ic, some mechanism to let user refill the boiler. Disposeable vape should have not existed at first place
Some of them (actually most of them where I live) are rechargeable, they're not refillable and you can't change the atomizer (wick and coil). And the most expensive part of the vape is the tax on nicotine liquid, so there is little sense to hassle with wicks and refills.
Given the environmental impact of disposable vapes (the littering was awful), some places have already implemented bans. The UK's ban came into force June 2025.
> Disposable vape should have not existed at first place
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.
This is a really interesting topic but not a thorough article imo. I don't really understand how the 6 flavours come about, what the sucking positions the author mentions are etc. Would love it if you go into more detail. Also, now I have a very strong urge to buy one of these things and take it apart. Inspirational!
That's such an interesting design choice. Very curious why they went with the mic approach. maybe because it was already there to sense sucking anyway.
It feels so odd to think that the human which is self poisoning with an electronic device that will be neglectedly thrown on public area is not that different from the one who would diligently bring it to a trash, even curiosity didn't jump in to enjoy analysis of the device.
A few years ago I saw a vape with a full display that played a pac man clone aside from the state and settings, and now I have a drawer of random vape screens and components that I swear i'm going to use one of these years.
After-school tech club idea: instead of just handing kids an Arduino, tell them to get their purloined vapes out of their pockets and hack 'em till you get JTAG or semixosting working.
Doesn't look like SMD was great. This looks like lowest cost has gone back to .. rows of people with a soldering iron patching the cheapest possible flow process.
I'm amazed there isn't more of an outcry against these things. I'm not an environmental activist, but even I'd feel wrong just throwing something like that away.
Put it this way, from engineering and technology perpective vape is equivalent to generalization of smoking tools (cigarette, pipe, etc). Naturally it's a very complex as a system and no small feat because you are going to generalize relativity and AI, for examples general relativity and AGI, respectively.
Alternate take: Is this really "a ridiculous amount of tech", or just "how things are today"?
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".
Both are true. Today we get a ridiculous amount of tech for <$1.
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.
The ESP32 (with Bluetooth and WiFi) is like $5 on AMZN. Which is probably sub-$2 in any meaningful quantity in Shenzhen. We've been living, at least until the tariffs, in a StarTrek like world where whatever we want is available from Shenzhen for a ridiculously low price (which in many respects is better than "free" because "free" brings with it its own humongous problems).
It upsets me that disposable vapes are not more prohibited. Where I live I often find vapes discarded in parks and other areas where they can be a fire hazard.
These products are targeted towards high school teens and middle schoolers, carry a number of serious health risks, and anyone involved in making them can rot in hell.
The only realistic risk so far is addiction and a nicotine addiction doesn’t ruin lives. Other than that it’s marginally bad for the heart and so far atleast not carcinogenic.
> 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
Nicotine gets metabolised into several compounds within the human body which are carcinogenic, even if pure nicotine in itself isn't.
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.
As stated by a sibling comment, at least the carcinogenicity part isn't true. Unfortunately, even nicotine gum should be carcinogenic (and is of course not intended to be used for consumption besides of alleviating withdrawal effects).
You cannot say "better" in this context without an almost endless degree of quantification that could fill textbooks. By what metric? Public health? Cost effectiveness? Environmental impact? How do we measure these things? I assume you're arguing a health perspective (which, at this point all we can say is probably better), but in the context of TFA "better" is more likely to be interpreted in an environmental context, of which I haven't really been convinced either way.
Is this actually disposable if it has the rechargeable battery and display? Or is it maybe like a lighter that technically can be refilled but nobody ever does?
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.
It's both disposable and rechargeable. It has to be rechargeable as the battery doesn't contain enough capacity for the total amount of juice that's stored in them. E.g. a vape could have 10k puffs of juice, but the battery only lasts for ~2k of puffs so you have to recharge it about 5 times until the juice runs out. But once it runs out, there's no way to refill the juice so they get discarded.
I remember when these USB-C vapes originally came out, we were joking that vapes got USB-C before the iPhone did.
Edit: You were complaining about 'environmental' HN users, but now you've edited your comment. I guess you read the article and were convinced, that's great :)
It's not rediculous if you look at this through a modern lens. In reality this tech is cheap. Trying to keep it around is hoarder mentality. You are stockpiling garbage which can be cheaply replaced.
I think recycling and upcycling are good practices. With them, you can build missile, drone tracking systems and water irrigation systems, smartwear and other control for almost nothing.
For these devices the microcontroller needs to be super cheap. Microcontrollers like the Puya PY32 Series (e.g., PY32C642, PY32F002/F030) can cost in the $0.02 - $0.05 range for the kind of many-million volumes applicable for disposable vapes. These are 32-bit ARM Cortex M0 MCUs, running at a 24 MHz clock or similar, some with 24 KB of ROM and maybe 3 KB of RAM!
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!
Which is why when folks nowadays say "you cannot use XYZ for embedded", given what most embedded systems look like, and what many of us used to code on 8 and 16 bit home computers, I can only assert they have no idea how powerful modern embedded systems have become.
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.
> Which is why when folks nowadays say "you cannot use XYZ for embedded", given what most embedded systems look like, and what many of us used to code on 8 and 16 bit home computers, I can only assert they have no idea how powerful modern embedded systems have become.
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.
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Be heartened that your choices are meaningful. The impact of e-waste on ground contamination from landfills in the United States and Europe is negligible, and landfill capacity itself does not approach the level of emergency that planetary warming is for human civilizations.
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.
Something I recently found out about ARM Cortex M0s, they are small enough and cheap enough that they get used in USB cables to handle protocol negotiation between devices.
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.
The idea that people are smoking arm chips makes me laugh.
Not smoking, vaping - better for your health but not RISC free.
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This is your brain. This is your brain on ARM.
Technical Boy's vape is here: https://giphy.com/gifs/americangods-vape-american-gods-26BGN...
It also stood out to me how little stuff is in there - there's the uC itself, 3 transistors for heating the flavor canisters, an op-amp for the microphones, but other than that I don't really see anything - no external oscillator, no vrm (though a charger/BMS circuit must be in there somewhere).
I see lots more cost-cutting corners they could take...
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
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The vape is disposable, no need for a charging circuit and maybe a simple ADC to determine battery life based on a discharge curve.
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How close are we to smart dust I wonder? How small can we make wireless communications?
> How close are we to smart dust I wonder? How small can we make wireless communications?
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.
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This is exactly it. The tech in these sorts of devices is way overpowered for what they are or need simply because it's a lot cheaper to do it that way than it would be to use more appropriately scaled computing power. Either the "more appropriate" components are no longer in production, or they are in production but are now considered somewhat niche and are only produced in volumes that make them considerably more expensive than the more advanced/powerful options.
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.
> These are 32-bit ARM Cortex M0 MCUs, running at a 24 MHz clock or similar, some with 24 KB of ROM and maybe 3 KB of RAM!
So, probably enough to land on the moon. And cheap enough to justify a dozen backups.
For the even cheaper e-cigarettes many vendors are producing dedicaded ASICS integrating heater control, pressure sensing, battery management, for as close to free as it gets. It's astonishing.
It's all integrated on a tiny PCB mounted to the back of the microphone.
The Z80 didn't even do 8 bit add. The ALU operates in two 4 bit cycles.
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!
What a world we live in; we have gotten to a point where computers are so small and cheap that they can literally be “disposable”.
It’s beautiful, I love it.
For my part, I hate anything explicitly labeled "disposable". As the author writes, you're supposed to recycle it, but how many people will do that if it has "disposable" written on it? Even worse, if it was truly disposable they could use a non-rechargeable battery, but because they have to keep up the pretense of it being reusable, they have to include a rechargeable battery with more dodgy chemistry that probably shouldn't end up in a landfill...
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> It’s beautiful
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!
It reminds me of how Sussman talked about someday we'd have computers so small and cheap that we'd mix dozens in our concrete and be put throughout our space.
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> It’s beautiful, I love it.
When computers become disposable, their programmers soon become disposable as well. Maybe, you shouldn't love it.
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Wow: the Sinclair ZX81 launched in the UK in 1981 for around £49.95 as a kit (£50) and £69.95 assembled, making it incredibly cheap, and later in the US as the Timex Sinclair 1000 for $99.95 (kit) or $149.95 (assembled)
Cheap for a 1980s computer, now pennies. Wild.
"Microcontrollers like the Puya PY32 Series (e.g., PY32C642, PY32F002/F030) can cost in the $0.02 - $0.05 range"
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"
> [...] while the cost of the processor is 2 - 3 orders of magnitudes less.
Is that inflation adjusted? If not, the real cost difference is even starker.
Nowsdays computers misguided us to think that we need to measure RAM in GB and storage in TB. There are a lot of "invisible" applications running on 8bit MCU (not ARM based and more modern than ZX80) and few kB of flash and a bunch of RAM (64 bytes in luxury models). In this context matter more the integrated peripherals like ADC, DAC, PWM, etc that simplify the complexity of board and reduce the total cost.
idea for a hobby project for someone better versed in hw than me - create a computer that can at least run basic with the MCU from the disposable vape.. :)
first one to run doom on a vape would do great numbers on youtube
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I've bought hundreds of Puya's for my lab stock on LCSC. Neat little things!
How usable are they for hacking? I've had bad experiences with more obscure chips requiring custom programmers/debuggers.
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> What an amazing time we live in!
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.
Many countries have deposits for single use bottles/cans but an electronic device with a lipo battery is seen as perfectly fine to throw away.
These things should have 100 times the deposit amount of a can of soda with mandatory requirements for retailers to take the 'empties' back.
Why stop there? I think more or less every non-durable product manufacturer (say, lifespan less than 5 years) should be required to take the product back at end of life and dispose of it properly. Trash is an enormous externality. I'm talking about plastic clamshells, container lids, "disposable" storage containers, the lot.
"Why stop there" is often a reason why nothing gets done. Why do small if you can go big right away? Because going big right away is costly (in social cost, in convincing, in how much people need to change behavior, ...) and that prevents people from doing it in the first place because the threshold is high. Apathy is the result. Better to take a small step first, then get used to the measure / the cost, then have a next phase where you do more.
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.
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> more or less every non-durable product manufacturer (say, lifespan less than 5 years) should be required to take the product back at end of life and dispose of it properly
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.
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Switzerland has something like this for "eWaste", it's called the ARC [1] (Advance Recycling Contribution). For any electronic device you purchase a small tax is collected and used for the recycling and collection of the future waste it will generate.
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...
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Go further. Every product must be returned to manufacturer at end of life.
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.
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Trash piles is one way the actual cost of things is obfuscated and punted to future generations.
A lot of people wouldn’t want this because it’s asking for stuff to become more expensive for them.
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I’m reading ‘The World Without Us’ by Alan’s Weisman. Last thread like this had someone recommend it (thanks!).
Every bit of plastic humans have made still exits, bar a small amount we have burnt.
That’s concerning.
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It will raise the costs and the prices, people will be unhappy and this will result in far-right populist parties taking over.
Mechanism design for better trash economics is hard for the same reasons that making a good linearly typed programming language is hard.
I'm not kidding :)
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Stopping there makes sense because plastic sitting in a landfill isn’t harmful. Lithium batteries require special hazmat procedures.
Why is trash an "enormous externality"? Even if the retailer took it back it would still be... trash.
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Because it has to start somewhere.
Also many countries collect disposable plastic.
Yes let’s burden any fledging company with the added bureaucracy of having to set up trash collection, disposal and recycling.
They should just be banned outright. In no world is this going to end up in bins 100% of the time. Disposable really means it’s destined for the trash at best, and just simply litter at worst.
This guy[1] explains the problem quite well.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy-wFixuRVU
Yeah ban is the answer. Trouble is that, as shown in the article, even if they include the charging and refilling bits they can be cheap enough to throw away after use.
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.
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I think disposable vapes are banned in the U.K. (where I think the author is?) or at least they will be soon. But the non-disposable options end up being cheap enough that they can be disposed of when empty.
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.
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Most countries don't do enough at all.
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.
> As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in place
In Dutch Mediamarkt, the same company as Saturn in Germany I believe, they have bins for electric devices.
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Not sure about electronics as a whole, but I was able to recycle (or at least dispose of properly) an inflated old Dell laptop battery at either a Best Buy or a Home Depot (I'd assume it was the former, but they were next to each other so I don't recall). This is in the US.
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>As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in place
I Portugal there is Rede Electrão. You can deposit those devices in a lot of supermarkets, stores and fire stations.
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Maybe Italy is more advanced, you can bring eWaste to the municipal center or to leave to the shop where you are buying a new device. On the street they started to place bin for small eWaste like phones, chargers, keyboards, vape.
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/
> 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.
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.
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Based on your reply you haven't fully considered context. Smokers don't care about themselves or else they wouldn't smoke. As demonstrated by the article, you can see proof that they also don't care for the environment. What makes you think people who intentionally pay to kill themselves and then throw the waste on the ground instead of trash will ever recycle?
Smoking is expensive, and people carry these in their pockets, and replace them within hours once they run dry.
If there were a deposit scheme of say five bucks a piece, I'd wager you'd see >80% return rates with every purchase.
This is so incredibly simplistic it cannot be an argument in a good faith.
Addictions exists. To stop smoking is HARD. Nicotine addition us on par with benzos, prescription opiates or amphetamines.
Why though? Bottles/cans are easily recycled and I believe the small reimbursement is easily recovered during the recycling costs.
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.
> 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.
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.
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Because they are a fire hazard:
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.
How and why are the environmental effects not a factor for you?
It's very profitable to recycle small electronics in some economies where thousands of companies do it (eg India or Shenzhen); in countries where human labour is more expensive, it's untenable
I see more vape litter on the beach than bottles and cans. The deposit is part of why that is
I just received a $10 deposit refund for returning my motorcycle battery to the battery shop.
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What if it worked like the carts at Aldi? Put something reasonable like 3-5 bucks on the sale amount, and redeem the same amount when returned.
Yes, that is also how the deposit on a can of soda works.
i pay 25c to leave my cart in the lot
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I feel like the take it back approach, just ends with the retailer/manufacturer throwing it away anyway.
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.
Who bears the cost of that improvement? Either the manufacturer, the retailer, or the customer. The problem is that the waste created by vapes is a negative externality so there's no incentive to improve their design. Until the government starts requiring safe disposal of these things, we won't see a change. Think about what people used to do with old car oil before new environment protection regulations.
The problem is you can’t find any company willing to recycle them. Because of the nicotine content, I’ve heard e-waste recyclers consider them hazardous waste and refuse to touch them.
vape products does not all contain nicotine, it's an ingredient you choose to add in your blend,
you can choose to either vape a flavour version only, or one containing a certain amount of nicotine
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yeah, e-waste recyclers suck, they love to ship it all to the 3rd world where piles of circuit boards get tossed in an open fire and stirred by kids to reclaim the metals.
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...
God bless these horrible devices are not disposed in billions every day as bottles are!
I've seen some universities in my country have deposit boxes specifically for single-use vapes
I don't want to advertise for the brand but I bought a disposable "looking" vape today where they split the liquid from the core. So the end result is a very small stick but is actually re-usable and they had a re-cycling digital bin.
> Many countries have deposits for single use bottles/cans [...]
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.
It's much easier to recycle things when everyone participate and bring their trash to a common place.
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
You think China is gonna take all of em back?
Why should that be China's problem?
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).
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"I Powered My House Using 500 Disposable vapes" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy-wFixuRVU
Man. I don't actually know anyone who vapes. I see it in public sometimes and just assumed people refilled them - maybe they do. Seeing him hold some up, seeing all that plastic, metal, electronics, all that Work (Joules) expended, in something that you just dump after a day is nuts. I can't think of anything else like that. Maybe plastic water bottles but they don't have even half the materials or complexity? Maybe I under-estimate how much is put into regular cigarettes or beer & cans.
Refillable vapes used to be the standard around a decade ago, back when a liter of vape base (without nicotine) cost 30€ at max. Disposable vapes pretty much didn't exist. Now the same liter of vape base (still without nicotine) is a "tobacco product" and costs 400€+ due to taxes thanks to decade-long lobbying efforts by big tobacco, turning refillable vapes into a massive niche product due to single-use vapes costing the same or less, without any of the hassle of mixing your own liquids or having to refill them.
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A little calibrating correction: A vape should last more than a day unless you're a very heavy user. Around three days with a '700 puffs' one maybe, and a week wouldn't be unheard of.
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The complexity of a can isn't as extreme as a disposable ARM chip, but it is still quite a sophisticated mass produced object. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUhisi2FBuw
Many daily life, single use objects have a lot of thoughts put into them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj0ze8GnBKA
What a brave and adventurous soul.
If you believe Lumafield, 8% of low-quality lithium ion batteries have a mechanical defect that can sometimes lead to a short circuit.
Is this person really brave, or just unaware of the risks?
https://www.lumafield.com/article/finding-hidden-risks-in-th...
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Running a web server off a disposable vape: https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/
Soon: "Quake on a vape pen"
Is that a LAN party in your pocket?
I mean, naturally there's Doom on a vape [0], so as far as I'm concerned, that box is already ticked. Someone should give a good name to the law that every hardware device with a screen has a Doom port.
[0] https://github.com/atc1441/Vape_DOOM_ScreenShare
of course it had to be Bogdan to do something like this ahahah :)
Our whole current civilization could be construed as advanced alien tech servicing a humongous tribe of moronic apes. The fact that one fifth of the internet is dedicated to porn just speaks for itself. Just thinking about all the tech involved, from the capturing of footage using highly sophisticated camera, to the transmission over kilometers of fiber optics, to the stokage into redundant and consistent databases backed by highly optimized hardware and brilliantly engineered file format, to the distribution to your phone device, which is literally a personal computer that fits in your palm.. all of that just to show porn to satisfy your monkey brain.
It seems almost absurd to what length humanity has gone just to satisfy it's primitive needs.
Let's not forget that with both porn AND all the other "junk food" on social media that we waste away on: there are very smart people getting paid a lot of money to make/keep you hooked on them.
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."
This is an issue I've perceived with technology for a while now. Even a lowly ape like myself can gain disproportionate rewards from using computer technology in ways that many people around me can't. I could use it in constructive or exploitative fashions if I chose to, at scales I could never imagine without it. That has never sat well with me because I know there are people smarter than I am with a lot more resources than I have. And they also have no scruples, so exploitation is in their tool box.
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.
In the past, entire intercontinental trade routes existed just to get food seasoned, so what you’re pointing out isn’t that unusual. The desire for sensual pleasures drives most things (and not only in humans).
I feel like our whacky world is only made possible by fossil fuels. Like why is it profitable to
- 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??
It's interesting that this is where your mind goes on an unrelated bit of content.
3% of the internet is complaining that 20% of the internet is porn.
--source, my butt.
And yet it utterly fails to satisfy these needs in a real way
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A lovely video from a Shenzhen factory, mass producing disposable vapes, in case someone's interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WohEiRvn2Dg+
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.
lol, at 0:15 someone is literally testing the vapes with their mouth. I hope they don't do that all day long
Later at 6:45 they show more people testing them
It’s hard to know for sure what’s acceptable when it comes to working conditions in China. The information we get is incredibly limited. Most of what makes it through is propaganda.
That said, it wouldn’t surprise me if he does it all day long, 6 days per week.
They are, there's a video on YouTube you can find where they interview someone with that job and they test 10,000 a day. Then they mention that they go home and vape some more
That’s much less automated than I would have thought. Also the dude vape testing the sticks… I don’t think they are aware they are probably doing more damage than good.
Not great from a hygiene perspective given they never show it being sterilised after the manual check.
It's not that surprising that a company that sells these awful gadgets to people who don't really care about their own health would behave in such a manner.
I don't smoke/vape, but I saw some pretty absurd models available recently that really piqued my interest. One had a touchscreen, could run some basic apps, and had wifi/bluetooth support. The other had a d-pad + buttons built in and a few ripoffs of classic games you could play. I bought one of each to start ripping them apart on my work bench and playing with the firmware. Unfortunately I got busy and haven't done much more than look at the internals. They're using some sort of cheap smart watch SoC. It's wild you can get a battery, touchscreen, charging circuit, and a microprocessor for like $12.
This shouldn't be surprising since a vape is a safety critical device. Primarily because the temperature control has to be precise and you have to solve a surprisingly large number of control problems that can arise in real life. For instance, if you overshoot the temperature the amount of toxic by-products can increase sharply. You can also cause parts of the vape to disintegrate, and then aspirate things you really do not want in your lungs.
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 think you overestimate how much vape companies care about safety. When there is no liquid left, you just vape smoke from burning cotton (it tastes like burned plastic) on half of these devices. There are checks for this, but they are not that good.
I'm sure most don't care more than regulations require them to care (including making tradeoffs in terms of risks of getting caught, and the chance of actual enforcement). But that doesn't change the fact that it is a safety-critical device. It produces something that interfaces directly with sensitive tissues.
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'd love to see a breakdown of the design and whether or not any of these vapes have any Safety Critical Function considerations, or if they just rely on the mcu for everything and have a ton of single fault risks.
As a smoker who transitioned to vaping, I see immense health benefits.
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 when legislation comes in regarding "disposable" vapes - manufacturers skirt around that by making the fluid chamber a removable pod that can be swapped for others, and a USB-C port for charging the device itself.
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.
Have you seen the list of substances found in these things?
https://www.unodc.org/LSS/Announcement/Details/8afbc6e8-9439...
You get downvoted because you're implying substances like methamphetamine are common in vapes (as per your linked article), which it obviously is not, and already highly illegal.
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.
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I would dearly love to know why I get downvoted for providing concrete evidence of serious problems with controlled drugs in vapes.
The rechargable vapes just get disposed anyway.
We really need to ban these things.
The reason disposables are so popular in the US is the FDA banned any flavored cartridges, which doesn't include disposables. The immense battery waste is a direct result of a relatively new law.
That doesn't explain why vapes are so rife elsewhere, particularly the UK. They're popular because, as the FT described, they're the ultimate product. Cool, cheap and addictive.
https://www.ft.com/content/f72f17e4-a83d-4494-b1e7-a349cc7ae...
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Good intentions and lack of foresight often combine poorly.
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The other reason is regulatory arbitrage -- the disposal vapes are often illegal products that circumvent laws in general.
The other reason is kids.
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.
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I seriously wonder how it's even feasible for these things to be profitable.
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> FDA banned any flavored cartridges, which doesn't include disposables
Wait, what? Where's the sense in that?
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Did that in Australia - the problem is even worse now. Disposable vapes were a market response to banning and restricting pod vapes (where you can keep the base and just swap out the pod).
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.
Sounds like they didnt ban it properly. There aren't really nicotine junkies like heroin. So I suspect ban nicotine and slowly everyone stops using nicotine sources.
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They are straight up banned in Australia but you often see them chucked in the gutters and rivers. Only seems like they started raiding the stores in the last few months.
The vape ban in Australia is utterly stupid though. All vapes are banned, not just disposables, and guess what's easier to discretely sell to kids from a newsagency.
Doesn't seem to have stopped kids getting their vapes yet I need to import my cannabis vape via the black market.
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Why do we need to ban these? I'm not trying to be contrarian, but why do some people appear to be for banning tobacco but not alcohol? I don't claim to have all the answers or even strong opinions, but if your going to ban one recreational drug with negative externalities you should ban them all. I'd much rather hear people's opinions then ask AI.
If alcohol came inside of little battery powered computers, we should ban those too.
I don't think the post you're responding to is saying that vapes should be banned. Just disposable ones.
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No, banning disposable vapes
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I think broadly prohibition didn't work but smoking bans do. Where "work" means fewer people smoke and passive smoke.
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Singapore and AFAIK Thailand banned vapes altogether. And it seems to be actually enforced. They have completely different grounds for it but still, there's already some movement in this space.
Vapes illegal, but weed legal, that's great
Pipe and roll-your-own tobacco are also banned in Singapore, but regular cigarettes are sold just fine. There may be a different reason for the bans.
Not. I've seen young teenagers vape in Thailand, that's how enforced it is. They only catch foreigners from whom they can extract thousand-dollar bribes.
No, just let the scavengers continue collecting and reusing them.
as a first step, let's tax these things. this is such an immense waste of electronics.
I hate smoking, never smoked. Should the vapes be banned because of e-waste, or high school kids getting strung out, or what? It's not a world I know.
They do seem to be banned in an around 10 states at this point though there is some sort of existing stock law or something so if you ask them you still seem to be able to buy them. They don’t seem to be on display anymore though.
I've just started a Salvage Pile in my workshop. Laser printer with fax modem was the first for excision and harvest. I could feel the addiction take hold before the last of the plastic shell was tossed into the refuse bin. The stepper motors alone!
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 the microwave, here’s a token “please safely discharge and double check the cap” comment!
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.
As a second regards the microwave, depending on the age, please be extremely careful about the magnetron the insulators on which could contain beryllium oxide, which can kill you.
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.
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> Closer to 15 or 20 in greater London in the UK.
Weren't disposable vapes banned in UK in May 2025? Is the problem still that big?
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Go too far and you might be labeled a hoarder.
I still think the next evolution of these vapes is for a Tamagotchi-esque device to get built into them and to have the pet grow when you inhale through it. You're already walking around with enough tech - why not gamify it more?
Indeed: https://futurism.com/neoscope/vape-tamagotchi-interview
I think you might be joking but OK, I'll respond like you're serious as this is HN.
You want to make vaping even more addictive than it already is?
They’re making a prediction, not a value judgement.
Some of the COVID test kits that were popular a few years ago(!) were even more complex.
"One man's trash is another man's treasure."
In the 70s, the Polaroid SX-70 camera included a disposable battery in every film pack. After 10 shots, you threw away both it and the plastic film case with its large metal spring mechanism. When the film production stopped in the late 00s, you could use 600 film designed for other polaroid bodies reloaded into a 779 native SX70 cartridge, because the battery would last much longer than the initial 10 shots.
I promise to cry if a docker container is found in there.
Scheduled by k8s
the way they're discarded definitely embodies the "cattle not pets" approach
By 2040 there will be a disposable LLM in there as good as today's claude.
By 2080, it will be fully sentient, and derive pleasure when you use it, and suffer loneliness if you don't, and do its best to convince you.
Basically the weapons from "High on Life" or the butter robot from Rick and Morty, but as a vape.
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Currently working on a method to recycle / repurpose the li-ion cells obtained from the disposable vapes, trying to scale up the recycling effort by releasing products to fund the manpower required to breakdown and sort the vape components . Getting close to releasing the first 100 demo models of the product for stress testing in the wild. Currently based in the greater Seattle area and here is a link to my site if anyone wanted to know more: https://2ndchancemnd.com/
Came to this thread to shout you guys out! I was super impressed by your presentation at Open Sauce 2025.
Someone reversed a vape that contains a Puya Microcontroller. https://github.com/grahamwhaley/py32c642_vape
In 40 more years I wonder what the equivalent of "same specs in a disposable vape as home computer from 80's" will be
It feels like we’ve turned every physical object into a distributed system with firmware updates, a network stack, and a failure mode that requires rebooting your house. All that compute just to do the same job the purely mechanical version did for decades, except now it can also crash.
I to wait for the deposable vape robotic uprising.
I found a discarded working vape that had a complete working game system (screen with controls) built-in... a very attractive package to small kids.
I have used these disposable vapes before, and it saddens me that so much tech (including those batteries!) are just thrown away. Like what ever happened to reducing e-waste.
It's wild to think about the e-waste implications of this. We are effectively throwing away a basic smartphone's worth of complexity and lithium every week.
It being activated by microphones makes me think you could add speakers to this tiny format and make a tiny digital instrument that's influenced by blow intensity etc.
Suck.
I remember the good old days when a "vape" was just a sturdy housing for a rechargable battery, some heating wire, cotton and juice. The power was determined by the resistance of the coils you built. Those things would last forever.
Until people started launching them into the ceiling...
I can't believe these are legal, especially in countries that supposedly care a lot about the environment and where people are even quite annoying about, for example, only using the "Eco Mode" on household appliances (also known as the "won't clean your dishes" mode, "won't clean your clothes properly" mode...)
Run your hot water for a few mins prior to turning on your washing machine - makes a hell of a difference, everything else being equal.
Hosting A Website On A Disposable Vape
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/15/hosting-a-website-on-a-dispo...
That is a lot! But that's also an expensive vape, with way more tech than cheap ones. Here you can get one for ~10 Euro, and they are NOT rechargeable or anything.
Does anyone remember when e-cigarettes first came out and they were intended to be a stop smoking aid? That didn’t last long!
What do you mean? Smoking rate have certainly declined since vapes have been a thing.
I just dont understand disposable vape. It's very easy to convert one into "reuseable": Add a charging port, a cheap li-po charger ic, some mechanism to let user refill the boiler. Disposeable vape should have not existed at first place
Some of them (actually most of them where I live) are rechargeable, they're not refillable and you can't change the atomizer (wick and coil). And the most expensive part of the vape is the tax on nicotine liquid, so there is little sense to hassle with wicks and refills.
Given the environmental impact of disposable vapes (the littering was awful), some places have already implemented bans. The UK's ban came into force June 2025.
> Disposable vape should have not existed at first place
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.
This is a really interesting topic but not a thorough article imo. I don't really understand how the 6 flavours come about, what the sucking positions the author mentions are etc. Would love it if you go into more detail. Also, now I have a very strong urge to buy one of these things and take it apart. Inspirational!
There's a rotating mouthpiece apparently https://vaping360.com/vape-products/fizzy-max-iii-6in1/
I also found it interesting that the mouthpiece position would be detected with microphones rather than any other electronic sensors.
That's such an interesting design choice. Very curious why they went with the mic approach. maybe because it was already there to sense sucking anyway.
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It feels so odd to think that the human which is self poisoning with an electronic device that will be neglectedly thrown on public area is not that different from the one who would diligently bring it to a trash, even curiosity didn't jump in to enjoy analysis of the device.
A few years ago I saw a vape with a full display that played a pac man clone aside from the state and settings, and now I have a drawer of random vape screens and components that I swear i'm going to use one of these years.
Slightly deranged but serious question: what vape would be the easiest to convert/Frankenstein it into a Meshtastic node?
There’s more computing power in a disposable vape than in the Apollo Guidance Computer???
Yes, but there’s exponentially less talent on the engineering team
I can't believe this things even have microphones in them! That's a crazy amount of tech just to end up as e-waste.
Probably because the cost of adding it is low. If you already have an I2S capable MCU then adding a microphone is fairly low hanging fruit.
After-school tech club idea: instead of just handing kids an Arduino, tell them to get their purloined vapes out of their pockets and hack 'em till you get JTAG or semixosting working.
Amazing that they use a microphone array to sense the position of the suction.
Can it run Doom?
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.
> Can it run Doom?
Yes, there are even videos showing it on youtube.
Is this the "John Graham-Cumming", ex-CTO of cloudflare?
Yes, that's me.
yes! F9 on his website links to this very blog https://jgc.org/
Doesn't look like SMD was great. This looks like lowest cost has gone back to .. rows of people with a soldering iron patching the cheapest possible flow process.
I'm amazed there isn't more of an outcry against these things. I'm not an environmental activist, but even I'd feel wrong just throwing something like that away.
And they have little displays on them, OLED displays which show the battery life and remaining fluid.
I knew it was vapor ware.
Put it this way, from engineering and technology perpective vape is equivalent to generalization of smoking tools (cigarette, pipe, etc). Naturally it's a very complex as a system and no small feat because you are going to generalize relativity and AI, for examples general relativity and AGI, respectively.
So who is going to make some mesh firmware for these and all other garbage computers?
Alternate take: Is this really "a ridiculous amount of tech", or just "how things are today"?
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".
Both are true. Today we get a ridiculous amount of tech for <$1.
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.
Reminds me of a website that's hosted on a disposable vape: https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/
The ESP32 (with Bluetooth and WiFi) is like $5 on AMZN. Which is probably sub-$2 in any meaningful quantity in Shenzhen. We've been living, at least until the tariffs, in a StarTrek like world where whatever we want is available from Shenzhen for a ridiculously low price (which in many respects is better than "free" because "free" brings with it its own humongous problems).
$5 is very expensive in the microcontroller world.
Which 10 Cent Microcontroller is Right for You? Comparing the CH32V003 to the PY32F002A.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-n7vXHAqm8
What a waste of precious resources
Disposable vapes waste have big environmental impact.
Use regular vapes with e-juice
It upsets me that disposable vapes are not more prohibited. Where I live I often find vapes discarded in parks and other areas where they can be a fire hazard.
here in Greece you find it everywhere. I personally use the traditional e-juice vape to minimize waste.
It's beyond ridiculous, it's rechargeable but not refillable. As if a silicon tap was more difficult to design than a USB charging port.
These products are targeted towards high school teens and middle schoolers, carry a number of serious health risks, and anyone involved in making them can rot in hell.
The only realistic risk so far is addiction and a nicotine addiction doesn’t ruin lives. Other than that it’s marginally bad for the heart and so far atleast not carcinogenic.
Nicotine itself is carcinogenic in the mouth:
> 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
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Nicotine gets metabolised into several compounds within the human body which are carcinogenic, even if pure nicotine in itself isn't.
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.
As stated by a sibling comment, at least the carcinogenicity part isn't true. Unfortunately, even nicotine gum should be carcinogenic (and is of course not intended to be used for consumption besides of alleviating withdrawal effects).
Presence of the Carcinogen N′-Nitrosonornicotine in Saliva of E-cigarette Users: <https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemrestox.8b00089>
They’re better than cigarettes, so they’re the lesser evil.
You cannot say "better" in this context without an almost endless degree of quantification that could fill textbooks. By what metric? Public health? Cost effectiveness? Environmental impact? How do we measure these things? I assume you're arguing a health perspective (which, at this point all we can say is probably better), but in the context of TFA "better" is more likely to be interpreted in an environmental context, of which I haven't really been convinced either way.
They're not. The list of drugs found in them is terrifying:
https://www.unodc.org/LSS/Announcement/Details/8afbc6e8-9439...
I would argue that in the context of ops complaint they are worse.
Cyberpunk is real.
I haven't seen one in years, are they still legal?
this is a minor reason I like disposable vapes - have seen myself teenagers tinkering with them. has potential to teach a lot
Can it run doom?
Kind of! https://www.pcmag.com/news/hacker-gets-doom-running-on-a-vap...
Is this actually disposable if it has the rechargeable battery and display? Or is it maybe like a lighter that technically can be refilled but nobody ever does?
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.
It's both disposable and rechargeable. It has to be rechargeable as the battery doesn't contain enough capacity for the total amount of juice that's stored in them. E.g. a vape could have 10k puffs of juice, but the battery only lasts for ~2k of puffs so you have to recharge it about 5 times until the juice runs out. But once it runs out, there's no way to refill the juice so they get discarded. I remember when these USB-C vapes originally came out, we were joking that vapes got USB-C before the iPhone did.
See also
Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45252817
Hugged to death atm I guess
Such terrible waste of technology and environmental resources. Gotta be a better way. Maybe no vaping and some sort of paper patches instead?
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Sounds like you're whining to be fair.
Please have a read:
https://pirg.org/resources/vape-waste-the-environmental-harm...
Edit: You were complaining about 'environmental' HN users, but now you've edited your comment. I guess you read the article and were convinced, that's great :)
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It's hard to take these vape teardowns seriously when they call Propyleenglycol, nictotine salts, and flavors "poison".
It's truly a marvel of anti-scientific thinking.
There's a ridiculous amount of tech in the DNA and cellular machinery of a single bacterium.
When you poo though it doesnt require landfill and relatively less toxic.
Where do you think it goes?
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It's not rediculous if you look at this through a modern lens. In reality this tech is cheap. Trying to keep it around is hoarder mentality. You are stockpiling garbage which can be cheaply replaced.
I think recycling and upcycling are good practices. With them, you can build missile, drone tracking systems and water irrigation systems, smartwear and other control for almost nothing.