Comment by bborud
11 hours ago
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.