Talking of cheap and powerful devices one can also look at Chinese UZ801 4G LTE (Qualcomm MSM8916) dongles. They cost like only $4-5 and pack quite impressive HW: 4GB eMMC, 512MB RAM, actual 4G modem sometimes with 2 sim switching support. Since it's actually old Android SOC there is even GPU and GPS in there. And a lot of work was already done on supporting them:
I've found [1] to be the best guide for getting started with them; you need to make a copy of the firmware partitions that you re-flash after installing Linux onto it in order to get the 4G modem working. It's honestly absurd how much you're getting for a fiver with it; add a power bank (or make your own from scavenged vape batteries in the spirit of this post) and you have a full Linux machine with WiFi and 4G that can work almost anywhere.
There's a silver lining in raspberry pi and it's clones being so relatively expensive: they create a market and demand for hackable devices. In an age with so much pressure to plug every single digital hole, these devices bring some much needed market pressure to the opposite direction.
Or, put another way: to have electronics so cheap today, we're sacrificing empowerment technology could give us. We have dirt cheap supercomputers in our pocket, but what for? They're just overspecced entertainment machines.
The original Raspberry Pi Zero was a good deal at $5 or even at $10. Too bad it was always poorly available and mostly bundled with overpriced dongles, power supplies, SD cards etc.
The poor avaialbility was largely due to the great pricing: small commercial users scooped them up in the largest quanitites that they could because they were so competative against other options both in terms of pricce and having the advantage of decent support¹ unlike other inexpensive SoCs. Max-per-customer limits imposed by some distributors were not hard to get around. That meant it was difficult for the individual tinkerers that they were aimed at to get hold of them. And once an availability gap was spotted in the market the scalpers crowded in, so even those commercial users had trouble getting them at RRP.
If the current models were any cheaper, that might happen again. It is one of those places where the infamous “what the market will bare” works against us: unless you are buying in bulk you have the choice between paying more or having no availability at all.
People are willing to pay more the rPi units because of the support¹ and reliability². I know I am, last time I wanted a small unit like that I went straight for an rPi without even looking at the other options that might have been cheaper.
--------
[1] official + community
[2] While not perfect in that regard, no supplier is, and the Pis do seem to do better than others in that regard, especially when compared to anything noticable less expensive.
> The poor avaialbility was largely due to the great pricing:
the poor availability was because they didnt make enough. they blame supply chain issues around covid. in the time they were complaining that it wasnt their fault, competitors like the esp32 started appearing and taking market share. i was totally put off the rpi because of that saga. its no longer a good deal, there are better options in either direction (more microcontrollery or more power)
> the poor availability was because they didnt make enough.
I mean, yeah, that is obvious. But for early products, especially when the level of demand is greater than expectations as it was for both the early Pi and PiZero variants, it is sometimes impractical to ramp up production and supply chains fast enough. If they had made a pile more before release and demand hadn't been that high they would have gone bust with a load of stock in warehouses.
> they blame supply chain issues around covid
You've got your timeline very compressed there. The first couple of Pi Zero variants (this thread started with “The original Raspberry Pi Zero was…”) and supply issues associated with them, were around quite a bit before the effects of C19 and the associated supply chain problems. The Pi Zero 2 was released during the time when the chip shortage and related problems were biting, but the previous version was released a couple of years before 2020 and the first version a couple of years before that.
From what I've read online somewhere, Zero was a loss leader product made with input from Eric Schmidt, intended to be sold along attractive accessories. The Pi Foundation did try briefly but wasn't able to come up with the accessories, leading to that poor availability and WH variants that made little sense.
what you're generally paying for is support and community. havin people you can ask questions and knowing there's a good chance that soneone out there has both seen your issue and knows a fix is extremely valuable and worth the money if you're just trying to put together a small one off project.
Aliexpress. A simple TP4056 usb-c charging board costs as little as 50p. For a few pence more you can get a power bank board with a charge controller and a 5v boost converter.
Interesting, I have some TP4056 already, but wouldn't I need some form of "balance" circuitry if I want to connect multiple of these together, to ensure they're all charged and discharged evenly?
Well hullo there, turns out that's my old mate, the Snapdragon 410! Quite an unexpected surprise!
And funnily in retrospect, my Moto G3 from 2015 (which I still occasionally use for whatsapp!) has the exact same processor, and turns out base android (7) is (un?)surprisingly efficient when you're not doing much! I totally believe you could get a lightweight linux distro going on; I'm more impressed by such an old (and mobile!) chipset still having some sort of vestigial support!
(Fun fact, iirc this was one of the first processors to get 64 bit support for android but motorola wasn't able to port it over in time for the launch. Hence it runs 32 bit android instead!)
That's enough for a bare-bones WordPress installation.
My first laptop had a 100 MB had drive, 8 MB of RAM, and a 25 MHz processor, and I remember running a web server on it too, in addition to Windows 3.11 and word processors and other software. One of those dongles would have been godlike power back in those days.
I feel like somewhere along the way scripting got out of hand. Stuff like Wordpress is absurdly resource intensive.
Let's not overhype those days. I had a P1 166MHz and playing an MP3 meant everything else would have to be closed, if I'd open Word the song would stutter. Not all modern processing power is wasted.
b.) My lack of skills and time to build something really cool with something like this
A while ago i bought a licheerv nano (similar to luckfox pico or Milk-v duo) to build an open source iPod nano via usb-c audio Jack and the open source buildroot for the licheerv nano.
I did not find a suitable 2.4 inch or at least < 3"touch display that worked with the integrated MPI port.
With LVGL it should be doable to build a small portable audioplayer with acceptable features... But not for me :-)
Just fyi, the device at that link is currently showing $9.62 for a single unit, once logged in and the one-time-only "Welcome deals" are eliminated. But AliExpress pricing can vary hour by hour based on seller, inventory, algorithm, RNG.
I've noticed the wild fluctuations in price as well (by $10), is there some trick to timing the RNG right? I'm guessing it's intentional to get you to keep refreshing.
I just bought one for $1.07 US with free shipping. I was buying with a new account so I probably got that discount. But even so, before buying I got $2.99 the first time I loaded the page, then $9.89 or thereabouts, and finally $0.99 (which I bought, it had an additional $0.08 in fees for $1.07 total). We’ll see if it shows up and is hackable, but at that price it feels too good to pass up the chance.
Well, I guess my post was slightly misguided on price because I bought them in South East Asia and they look a bit more pricey in EU / US now. Might be some tariff price changes played the role IDK.
As for the chip basically almost all USB+LTE+WIFI sticks on Chinese marketplaces using it. They all have slightly different way to get adb / edl and flash, but all seems somewhat open.
Now what I'd like to see is the other way around - you know, like the "old" UMTS sticks, just for 5G. No OS, especially not one so prone to all sorts of security like Android, just a pure baseband chip, some interface chip that talks USB3, two built-in antennas and the option to connect more powerful/higher directionality external antennas.
Speaking of cheap and powerful, I’m looking for a dirt cheap android phone that has a decent camera. I used to ship out GoPros to my customers but I don’t actually need them to film in 4K, 1080p with a decent CCD would be fine. And lately new GoPro models have become a pain to setup, they require pairing with a modern mobile phone which my customers sometimes don’t have.
I've bought a lot of moto g and I concur. Camera is decent. It won't blow your skirt up, but it is roughly comparable to flagship phones from a couple of years ago. YMMV of course
A relative bought several products from Chinese company for a small product development. When he found the most suited device he asked if they'd sell without the enclosure, and maybe 1-2 other boards. They told him at 1000 pcs the best option was to buy them and toss the enclosure.
I had looked into "properly" buying LCDs once, just in case it had been within trivial reach of mine and I could just do what I wanted to do.
The one I was interested in would come in couples of aluminized vacuum sealed bags in a cardboard box, with 2k panels per each bags, laid out on plastic trays and stacked few up. The standard procedure to use these things is to wipe the bag surface to remove contaminants, leave it 24 hours at the factory to equalize temperature to avoid causing condensation, then tear it, and put it through production line before the panels degrade from absorbing too much moisture in the air.
I suppose you can forget about surplus parts or just buy 1/n of 2k parts at n/1 price premium from manufacturers with quote-unquote-nonfunctional parts, should you be contractually required to do so, but the point is, you can't easily produce just 1k of something in excess of 10 or so of prototypes built of no-guarantee spare parts.
Unless the total cost of gutting and reprogramming work exceeds that of fulfilling MOQ amounts of few thousands total(including customer warranty spares, media and storefront demo units, investors thank you specials, lottery prizes and all), it's going to make more sense to just buy and gut existing things, than producing just 1k units.
probably 2 screws at most or some glue/snaps, then put a jtag brush over the contacts, do some sort of unit test and you have a unit. Could take a few hours with a motorized screwdriver and a simple specialized CLI program for programming/testing
This would be so good for open source livestock tracker.
I chatter with a friend who works for this and bey built everything bespoke (tracking, temperature (good health indicator), steering (yes you can tell cows where to go), etc). My first question was - did you use some android platform?
Re-using this sort of device is super cool. I can imagine a post-apocalyptic scenario where a city is run on a hodgepodge of random computing devices like this.
I will say, though, disposable vapes with microcontrollers inside (and even full games and screens from recent reporting) are an egregious source of e-waste. Many layers of stupid are present here.
Another example: One-time covid tests with a microcontroller, optical sensor to read the result and bluetooth to connect to a phone to display the results. Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29698887
I've been aware about the perfectly reusable lithium batteries inside these disposable vapes, which is egregious enough.
But the one in the FTA comes with a full fat microcontroller and USB-C connector! I'm not clear if these connectors are accessible outside or if you need to break open the packaging before being able to get to it.
Like you said: "Many layers of stupid are present here"
All that hardware must surely be worth more than half the value of the actual product!
>All that hardware must surely be worth more than half the value of the actual product!
I'm constantly struck at how bread (a pastry, say) in a plastic tray, wrapped in plastic, is so crazy to me. The effort and technology that went, and goes, into oil extraction and such - only to throw the packaging away immediately that I get home ... it's just so unsustainable.
I wonder when in the West we'll start mining rubbish dumps ('refuse sites' where household waste is buried)? Maybe we already have? I know in developing countries people spend their days manually picking over such places.
> I wonder when in the West we'll start mining rubbish dumps
Never, because we have virtually unlimited space for landfills, and landfill tech has quietly been improving over the last few centuries, to the point that landfills are cheap, non-polluting, and entirely carbon neutral. Countries with less land mass (Europe et al) prefer incineration (mainly to save space, despite it being significantly worse for the environment and much more expensive (although with the newer energy reclamation efforts this is getting better)).
IMO it's not worth worrying about landfills too much. Household waste makes up about 3% of total landfill waste (when you add commercial/industrial/agricultural) in North America. You and your bun wrapper are truly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
This is backwards, it's not about eliminating the landfill, it's about recovering the materials which were previously not scarce but now are or will be soon.
No. Poorly separated wastes in landfill cause non-trivial methane emissions and other VOCs [0]. While leachate _may_ be captured, most of the time methane is definitely not.
For historic, sealed landfills, perhaps. Modern regulations require methane (LFG) capture for all non-trivially-sized landfills. In 2015, 74% of US household waste ended up in a landfill with a system to capture methane and convert it to energy[1], I suspect the number has increased over the last decade.
I think it’s less about managing the environmental impact of landfills and more about eventually the concentration of desirable materials in landfills may end up higher than in known natural deposits. Or at least easier to refine and separate.
Landfills are likely chock full of Aluminum, Nickel-Cadmium, Lithium, copper, brass, and all sorts of useful metals and chemicals.
Sure, the grand majority is going to be food waste, but if you threw it all into an incinerator and melted down the ashes there is probably a decent blend of valuable material mixed in with the waste.
Not sure how those are related. We only eat food coming in packaging comparable to transplanted organ because companies can't afford poisoning lawsuits because humans are so expensive.
Lots of people especially those generally "up north" undermine risks and therefore costs of food poisoning, but it's real. Haven't those people seen things growing molds?
How is plastic on bread related with food poisoning? Here in France baguettes are wrapped in paper and are eaten within a day or two of being made (or else they get dry). if you keep them for long enough, molds will grow on it, then you see them and don't eat that old bread (even though it's unlikely to be too bad for most people, the taste is certainly not great). I'd be surprised if anyone ever got food poisoned with bread.
> I'd be surprised if anyone ever got food poisoned with bread.
I'm about to blow your mind. It was and is one of the most common food poisoning types, especially B. Cereus and everyone's favorite religion-creator, C. purpurea / ergot.
Gross image warning (not sure why it's the first thing on the page but...)
Right, I was really focusing on the bread itself, given the discussion was about the wrapping, rather than previous poisoning of ingredients (unless I'm mistaken, plastic wrapping would not help against ergotism). I'm sure people also get poisoned with chemicals they might put on the crops as well...
Bacillus Cereus is the major modern issue, and it largely comes from soggy bread/rice/pasta, so plastic is a significant factor.
I completely agree with you that we should, in general, phase out plastic as much as we can, but we have to be realistic about the benefits and drawbacks. I don't think it's anything that couldn't be replaced with oiled paper, but plastic is used for some good and bad reasons.
Not strictly food poisoning, but my wife is extremely allergic to one of the types of seeds commonly put on bread. The plastic packaging virtually eliminates contamination between breads stored adjacent to each other. Since marrying her, I've stopped taking home bread in paper bags or bread lying in the open.
somebody once said oil is too valuable to burn for fuel. the important part are the petrochemicals, but the demand for fuel is so high that's where the money is
Not much; I used to think the same thing. But there are many ways to make the same chemicals from bio sources, either directly grown (corn or soy as feedstocks) or more processed, or bioengineered so bacteria convert some bio input to the desired chemicals
Between (a) component that costs tens of cents to mass produce and can be bought off the shelf and is reusable vs (b) component that needs actual experienced electronics engineers working on a single-use design that can not be repurposed later, I think we'd see that (a) might end up being less wasteful.
> Why not just sell a reusable vape that can be filled with the extract you want?
That's where the vapes started, and they still sell them.
I have a battery holder that's really just some control circuitry and a spot to shove an 18650. On that goes the tank which holds liquid and is refillable. Inside of that goes the "coil" which is the wick and heating element.
Daily I add a bit more fluid. Every 2-4 weeks I replace the coil. Every 1-2 years I replace the battery holder and tank. The 18650s I swap between to power it are 6-8 years old and still going.
(I'd replace the battery holder and tank less frequently, but I just can't find any that will last much longer than that banging around in my pocket and suffering the occasional drop or fall. All-in-all though, I've minimized the waste about as much as I reasonably can without quitting entirely.)
Somewhere in between and closer to what people are buying as "disposable" you can get refillable pods like my wife has. The "base" has a built-in battery and the circuitry. The tank and coil are a single unit. You add fluid and keep refilling until the wick/coil are gummed up, then toss the entire tank and coil... but keep the same battery/electronics.
Really, it's almost the exact same thing as these disposable units just with _very minimal_ changes to make them reusable.
Which is why I think these disposable units are extra heinous. There's just no reason for them to exist at all.
it's because politicians bend to pressure from lobbyists and outcry, such that the very idea that a resuable vape means that children can vape pina colada flavored liquids.
There was a federal push during Trump v1 to only allow iqos devices in any stores. The two vape brands (maybe 3) allowed in general in my state are manufactured by... if you guessed RJR and PMI, you are correct. The big tobacco farmers and cig manufacturers.
Reusable vapes with custom or pre-mixed flavors were attacked hard. I still have a couple liters of 100mg/ml nicotine in my freezer, for making custom flavors at home. I don't even know if you can still order nicotine in that ratio anymore in the US.
It's not so much that 99% go to the landfill, but this product does. Other products that use the same parts might be more reusable.
The point is that, most likely, the controller existed before this vape. Buying an off the shelf part can be cheaper than trying to bring up some custom part, both in cost and possibly in overall resources.
- If you want a custom part, you will need specialized equipment to build that part.
- If you want a custom part, you will maybe need to transport that part all around the world, while the off-the-shelf components might already be available close to your assembly plant.
The USB-C connectors are mostly for charging, and IME it'll take 4-6 full cycle charges until most are out of vape juice and disposable so they're always accessible. The packaging usually is snap-together with no screws so it's a puzzle.
I'm still surprised to see the fancier LCDs used which range from 2x4cm - slim 1.5x3cm (Digiflower, Raz is super popular.) Most LCD vapes which range from $20-25 are starting to fall by the wayside for $13-15 vapes with simple SMD LED displays with color overlays, (Kadobar, Geek Bar, Cookies, North) easy to make 7-segments for battery/juice status. Some are elaborate with wraparound displays that I've mistaken for flexible OLED and are deceptively cheap.
You begin by making a pen "from just the elements", then work your way up to there.
In other words, it's a huge challenge, but 6502 is closer, in complexity, to the pen than to the, say, AMD Ryzen.
But the primary idea behind Collapse OS isn't to run from 6502 built from the ground up (although it partly is), but to run from frankenstein cobbled up machines made from scavenged parts.
I wonder how many of preppers has mask images in their archives. Manufacturing primitive integrated circuits theoretically don't require digitally controlled machinery.
If I scavenge any machine today, how likely would I be to find a 6502 vs something more modern? I’d argue that some people might have a NES at home and one could get a 2A03 from it, but in a hypothetical scenario where I need to scavenge some computational power, I’d find an Android phone
You're much more likely to stumble one something more modern, but that modern something is also much less repairable. It's great if it works and if it can run Linux or Dusk OS, but when it can't, you're out of luck.
With a 6502 or other such CPU, the machines you scavenge them from are much more repairable and adaptable. You can use those components like lego blocks. It breaks? either repair it or strip the working parts to use in another frankenstein computer.
I get the idea of making a frankenstein computer, I just disagree that 6502 is THE platform to do it on. Practically, there's no way for me to find it. Other comment mentions ARM, which is a much more interesting proposal to me
ARM is an interesting proposal if you want to order a SBC online and run software on it. Soldering an ARM CPU with low tech tools? That's something else.
I have ported zForth to an even weaker chip, the famous 10c risc-v micro ch32v003 (16k flash, 2k ram) so no issue running on this: https://github.com/BogdanTheGeek/zForth
Allow me to brag about romforth (https://github.com/romforth/romforth) which I ported to the "3c" Padauk and can run on really small rom/ram microcontrollers.
Caveats:
- tested only on an emulator SDCC/ucsim_pdk, not on real hardware
- given how small the ram is, there is no user dictionary but new words can be defined and tested using what the Forth folks refer to as "umbilical hosting".
Even for a Forth, 3KB of RAM is rather tight. Dusk OS intentionally de-prioritize compactness and it couldn't run on that amount of RAM. It can get a C compiler loaded in about 100KB of RAM, but 3? not enough to boot.
OK, so we'd play with zForth then, as BogdanTheGeek notes here. That reminds me, I have a Scamp board sitting here on my desk that I really should play with more.
https://udamonic.com/what-is-a-scamp.html
"we'd", you mean in a collapse scenario? Forths are, by nature, "collapse-friendly", but one particularity with Collapse OS and Dusk OS is that they are fully self-hosted. This includes the tools necessary to improve upon themselves.
From a quick glance, it looks like BogdanTheGeek's Forth is written in C, which means that it's not self-hosted. If all you have is that disposable vape with this Forth in it, you lack the tools to deploy it on another machine or to improve it in place.
One could also port Collapse OS to ARM. I guess it wouldn't be a very big effort.
Good points! Really, I should start with learning Forth on the devices I have first, before getting to concerned about others. ARM does seem like a useful target though, given that they're basically everywhere these days.
No, it means computing has gotten so %$#@ cheap that it's cheaper to just cobble together cheap parts instead of spending the money to design a purposed device.
Laws are not here to make money, they are here to decide what kind of society we want. If electronics is too cheap and it creates wastes, I'm of the opinion that we should make it illegal, period.
>The fact that selling such a thing is profitable means that we lack regulations somewhere.
It's the exact opposite. Tobacco is so heavily regulated and taxed that these become profitable. If cigarettes were 3-4$ a pack (which they would be without sin taxes and regulatory overhead), the vape market would come down as well and there's no way these could be profitable. As it is, they retail around $20 and contain the same nicotine as multiple $10 packs of cigarettes.
The regulation was written in time when there were no such devices. Are they "healthier" (less damaging) for the user? If yes, let's tax them lower. Are they less damaging for whole population? Considering the e-waste, I guess not, but it's not up to me to decide. If they aren't, they shouldn't be taxed higher that cigs, if yes, let's change the regulation.
Because they contain so much more nicotine they are way more addicting, way better for the lungs than smoking but still bad for cardiovascular health. Disposables should be illegal for environmental protection reasons, that's a bit unrelated though since these companies can very easily switch to reusable/pod-systems.
We want people to vape rather than smoke tobacco, obviously, it's not a zero-sum issue.
While that does vaguely gesture at an increased nicotine consumption, it's pretty meaningless without the corresponding consumption rates. My gut suspects the average smoker goes through a pack of cigarettes a lot faster than the typical vaper goes through a rechargeable disposable vape.
Cigarettes could sell at 3-4$ a pack only because some regulation are in place that enforce the total separation of manufacturing and selling those packs from paying the cost for the societal damages wrt. health, pollution, littering...
There are many possible ways to slice the economical cake.
1) They don't sell for $3-4 a pack, yet your post seems to imply that the system has failed for cigarettes.
2) For externalities beyond the input cost of a product, the default [natural] condition is for those costs not to be included - one needn't enforce anything. Rather, it requires that someone with power put their thumb on the scale to enforce the inclusion of those costs during a sale[1].
Sorry it was unclear, I was replying specifically to:
> If cigarettes were 3-4$ a pack (which they would be without sin taxes and regulatory overhead),
Trying to show that 3-4$ a pack is not a more "natural" price for cigarettes than the current one, that it is a matter of perspective, and that if one wanted to construct such a natural price all externalities would have to be taken into account.
You can get 10 packs for 20$CAD on reservations in Canada, and that's for decent cigarettes in packaging, the really cheap ones in ziploc bags go even cheaper. 3-4$ a pack is still a decent markup.
Juul was very popular and less wasteful (although not perfect of course) as you disposed of the liquid pod rather than the whole device, they were regulated out of existence though. The regulations had loophole/oversight which paved the way for the disposable vape era.
There are many examples of good and bad regulations, I don't think you can just point at this one and say "see, regulation bad." They were too narrowly focused on cartridge based systems because that's what high school kids were hooked on.
Technically the disposables need FDA approval I think, many just don't have it. Manufacturers, importers, and retailers just don't care. There's a buck to be made and the spice must flow.
I think we need a regulation about trash. To be allowed to sell products containing things like electronic or plastics companies should be forced to collect x amount of this kind of trash.
The fact something is profitable (even vices) does not mean it requires regulations, unless the regulation in mind is direct or indirect cap on profit margins?
The missing regulation is some kind of tax or other disincentive against e-waste. I believe the premise of the GP is that such things can only be profitable if we chose to ignore their environmental impact.
...and consumption/dispersion/degradation of the finite/rare/precious resources used in the manufacturing process, which we could also factor in, if we wanted to be serious.
E-waste like this exists because it's legal and profitable.
I believe that we as a society don't want e-waste (at least I don't). And when the society does not want something profitable to be done, it sets regulations.
If it wasn't illegal to steal your neighbour's car and sell it, then it would be profitable. But we as a society don't want it to happen.
Are they an egregious form of Ewaste really? (Serious question). Because there’s so much reusable hardware in so many of the other things we throw out (phones, cars, laptops, etc) but we don’t make reasonable efforts to limit that. I’d love if the vape hardware was standardized to a degree for cool reuse projects like this. Donate a bunch of used vapes as hardware platforms for school projects? Like arduinos…but not.
Most of these vapes are reusable as vapes. They just get sold as disposable and the manufacturers don't include a refill mechanism.
I am very strongly pro-vape more generally but disposable ones should absolutely be illegal. They only serve to a) make them more attractive to casual users (instead of people switching from tobacco) and b) generate waste. Zero benefit to society.
There was a time when people could argue "the upfront cost of a proper vape is a problem that could keep people from switching from cigarettes". That's no longer true, there are incredibly cheap and compact refillable vapes now. (Well, there kinda always were, but they used to be crap. No longer).
The solution here isn't reuse it's just to stop production of them completely.
IMO the most egregious part is that all of these vapes come with perfectly good rechargable lithium batteries at a time where lithium is one of the most important resources.
And they all just go into a landfill without ever being recharged once. It really should be criminal.
Guess where that lithium came from in the first place? It's just going back where it came from, in a more processed form, for "storage" until miners get to it in the future.
At least in the US many of these no-name disposable vapes have a really high nicotine concentration too (since they're basically illegal why bother with labeling or regulations). So they're much more addictive.
They're cheap because they're produced in the millions if not billions. At that scale, each individual unit becomes disgustingly cheap. Some factory in China is pumping them out as fast as possible and slapping on the brand name of whoever is buying.
Disposable vapes were banned in the UK. Which in practise has meant that manufacturers have added the cheapest possible charging port which is non-standard so nobody can charge them and no way to open them to refill them.
I actually read the article you linked and these are clearly just shopkeepers breaking the law, lying about these being compliant. There is no legal loophole, except if you count a lack of enforcement as a loophole.
This is amazing, it reminds me of a biology article about a new life form that is not quite virus, not quite bacteria, but something that manages to blur the line between them.
Resource extraction eventually fills all niches, for better or for worse.
Almost every electronic device becomes disposable at some point, some sooner than others. Just make sure you bring them to an e-waste bin when that time comes. E-waste recycling is a profitable business, so there's always one nearby in my experience.
If you have some old Samsung Galaxy Gio from 2011, it'll provide far more value by recycling it back to raw materials than it would if you'd somehow try to keep it usable in 2025.
The problem here is planned obsolescence in a product's design. That is what needs to be made illegal.
> Almost every electronic device becomes disposable at some point
And we're all gonna die, why would we have laws at all?
When we say "disposable vape", it's not to say "it will eventually stop working". It's more to say "you use it, you throw it away".
> E-waste recycling is a profitable
I don't doubt it's profitable, but it's most certainly not a good thing for the planet. Recycling is generally not a solution to waste.
> The problem here is planned obsolescence in a product's design. That is what needs to be made illegal.
Seriously? We're talking about DISPOSABLE VAPES. They are built to last as short a time as possible. At this point I am not sure if you think you disagree with me, are just nitpicking for the fun of it, or something else?
I am not disagreeing with you. I agree that these disposable vapes should be made illegal. What I meant is that "disposing" is a broad term and is not always bad. Many good products eventually become naturally obsolescent, at which point it's often best to responsibly dispose of them.
The actual problem here is how the product is intentionally designed to only be used once, when that's absolutely unnecessary. We both agree on that. That falls within the issue of planned obsolescence, and that's what regulation needs to target.
Though I don't believe that when someone talks about a "disposable" product, they mean that "this is a product that you will dispose of before you die". Usually "disposable" means that it's meant to have a short lifetime.
A laptop or a smartphone are not "disposable" in that sense, even though we don't keep them for our lifetime.
Drawing the line will be the hardest part of writing a theoretical law banning electronics in disposable products. And the line will probably be obsolete a few weeks after the law takes effect. Which is why the line should be continuously drawn by a regulatory body, which in America are being an endangered species.
So they’ll get rebranded as decorative plastic sticks with a bonus temporary vaping feature, and the packaging will say that you must never throw it away, ever.
I really hope you are starting to understand the difficulty in regulating products like this. A lot of people don’t want to do the right thing.
Yes, Smoke Alarms should be thrown away. The element that detects smoke has a 10-year maximum life span, which is exactly why most have moved to a non-replaceable battery that forces you to throw it away (for safety).
I'm going to need to see some data to back up that claim. Americium-241 has a half-life of 432.6 years. The detector itself isn't going to degrade in any meaningful way after only 10 years.
Plus, many smoke alarms these days use a photoelectric sensor which don't wear out but are prone to false alarms from dust, etc. Smoke alarms SHOULD be cleaned at least once a year, by blasting them with compressed air. Dust buildup is a very common reason that smoke alarms stop working as well after any number of years. They require regular cleaning, just like everything else in the house.
Non-replaceable battery smoke alarms are popular because they are much more convenient to own. And you should NOT throw them away, the batteries in these contain lithium and must be recycled.
Interesting. We bought a bunch (5 pack, 6 pack?) from Costco IIRC about 3-5 years ago, and they all take 2 AA batteries, which is great because we've doubled down on Eneloop batteries for everything possible..
I didn't have to look far to replace my combo CO/Smoke detector or do a ton of hard searching to find one that just took a 9-volt. The first two results on Amazon US for "smoke detector" take 9-volts.
Those exist and are still available but are fairly outdated in the US. The sealed lithium 10-year disposable is the newer standard. And, actually, building codes for last several year requires them to be hardwired so no batteries at all.
The landlord special on older construction (maybe >10 years old, can't remember when the hardwire code went into effect) will usually be the 9v. Because they don't care about you having to get on a ladder to change the battery every year. They get to save $5-10 per smoke detector. Practically any homeowner is going to choose the 10 year option as the batteries don't have to be swapped.
I do wonder if there would be a workable law where companies are permanently responsible for what they produce, they must always accept back and responsibly recycle/break down to resources what they put out there, and do away with the shifting of responsibility of waste to society? Seems like a terrible engineering challenge but the right thing to do.
That would create a lot of work for corporate lawyers to create shell companies, merge/push-responsibility-onto/unmerge transactions, selling of "waste cleanup credits" by companies who then quickly go bankrupt (after the founders take all the $$ out of the company), etc...
If there's a will, there's a way... You can only sell "waste cleanup credits" to stable companies (exist more than N years, collateral funds in excess of what the waste disposal costs are,...). The problem is political, as usual.
Disposal fees were a thing here in Ontario, the idea being that consumers should pay up-front for the cost of disposal, and therefore expensive-to-dispose things (like things containing batteries) should cost more.
We rewarded the government that brought this plan in by replacing them with Doug Ford, the brother of the infamous late Toronto mayor Rob Ford who was a literal crack-smoking drunk.
I sure as fuck did not vote for Ford, directly or by the local MP proxy. However, I will readily acknowledge that at the time of the election that brought the Progressive Conservative party into power, the Ontario Liberal Party was giving off strong signals that it had essentially given up any attempt at excellence in its execution of public policy, and that it was seemingly bereft of significant insight beyond the then current state of governance.
They were also hindered by the public's perception of their performance in the matters of Ornge and Hydro One.
It seems strange to me to frame the results of that election as being a reward for re-internalizing the waste management costs of consumer products.
I realize it's a small part of a whole, but it's kind of hard to ignore the broad rejection of environmentalism that happened across-the-board in English-speaking Canada. Green Energy Act was hated and cancelled, eco-fees were hated and got cancelled, carbon pricing was hated and got cancelled, bike lanes are hated and got cancelled.
It seems like voters will reject any attempt to fight climate change if there is cost or inconvenience involved.
The mismatch between the Ancient Specs of Yore is kind of interesting. The Commodore 64 had 64KB of RAM, but that RAM was attached to an 8-bit, 1MHz CPU. This thing has call it half the RAM of a Commodore 64, but it's attached to a 32-bit 24MHz CPU the 1980s could only dream of. And it's disposable in 2025. Pretty impressive in a weird way.
Its only got 3k of RAM, 24k of flash. Although modern flash is sometimes the same bandwidth as memory was if you go back a bit, although not latency of course.
Fair enough. I've gotten out of the habit of thinking exponentially about computer performance. Modify my original post to that 1980s 8-bit era of personal computing. I did intend to compare it on the basis of the RAM available, which as is observed in another correction puts this more in the VIC-20 era...
... for those of us old enough to even have a mental distinction between "the VIC-20 era" and the "Commodore 64" era rather than just being a smear of bittyboxes all equally uselessly small....
I am happy they demonstrated how useful these devices are. Marking these as "disposable" is a kind of insanity. I recovered a few of them "disposed" (i.e. "randomly thrown away into") in an empty flower pot, and took out the LiPo batteries from them -- which are rechargeable, and have charge circuitry (non-trivial for LiPos). That we somehow decided that it's OK to design these to be used only once feels wrong.
This is the opposite of repairability. We specifically made them impossible to reuse and refill. Makes my tinkerer (and eco-friendly) heart very sad.
There are reusable vapes and reputable stores carry only those, but they are generally many times more expensive than disposable vapes, which are favored by smugglers (profit margins) and underage users (price point and potential seizing by parent/teacher/police).
Disposable vapes put young people in contact with career criminals and organized crime, who will be only too happy to oblige even if the customer has no money. The result is young people in debt to criminals, which has the exact same ramifications as getting in drug debt. Those young people can then be coerced to commit other crimes to cover their debts.
My reusable vape cost like 15$. It's basically the same components as a disposable vape, except I can refill a pod and switch the pod if I burn the wick.
Well, lucky you, I guess? Here they are considered tobacco products and taxed as heavily as cigarettes. I think the cheapest models are around $50.
That amount buys 10-200 disposable vapes from China, depending on how much you order at once and whether you care about the quality. Meanwhile, street resale prices are about $20 per vape. Smuggler’s heaven.
The smugglers / bulk sellers do sell to school kids, who then resell to their friends and even online (telegram most probably). Seen so many teenagers walk over as a random car pulls up to exchange vapes for cash. Even seen a big time dealer arriving at a teenager’s house party in a new, expensive car with a trunk full of vapes, accompanied by muscle, talking about how many of each flavor the customer is going to buy.
Maybe things are better on the other side of the big puddle, even if it means the same things are sold quasi-legally.
>"Disposable vapes put young people in contact with career criminals and organized crime, who will be only too happy to oblige even if the customer has no money. The result is young people in debt to criminals, which has the exact same ramifications as getting in drug debt. Those young people can then be coerced to commit other crimes to cover their debts."
This feels like pure fearmongering, and it's not even believable when most people here grew up around cigarettes, dip, or vapes in secondary school throughout the decades, and the dynamic was never anything like what you’re describing. Nobody was getting shaken down for cigarette or vape debts by “organized crime.” It was usually just some older kid or significant other, ex-student, or friend with a hookup who’d buy a pack or device and resell at a small markup. Sometimes it was even just a straight favor.
Trying to paint disposable vapes as a gateway to mafia debt collection just doesn’t square with lived experience in the US. Plenty of us experimented with nicotine products when we were underage - or know someone who did, and while that had its own health and legal issues, coercion into crime to cover “nicotine debts” simply wasn’t part of it lol
--
More people get into organized crime from their local Wal-Mart denying their job application as their only realistic ways to make money from labor, than ever do from nicotine products
what country contradicts my statements? Where in this world is getting spotted a Geek Bar equate to a severe debt that requires crime to pay off? Absurd premise.
Obviously it isn’t about a single vape. A bulk dealer wants to get rid of stock as quickly as possible, so they don’t expect a payment up front. Say it’s a box of 200 vapes. Then, someone steals it from the teenage vape dealer. Now, the teenager is out $4k in income but expected to pay $1k to $2k to the bulk dealer. That kind of debt to organized crime balloons fast; there are no controls on the interest. After a month of non-payment the amount owed may exceed $10k. At that point, the teenager can easily be coerced to commit additional crimes, including but not limited to hard drugs and murder.
I’d like to stress that this is not hyperbole, such things are documented to happen.
What does somebody buying hundreds of vapes to resell and then having them stolen have to do with individual customers, which was the original premise?
The conversation was about a single vape, and casual use, in the first place.
And yeah, I bet that's happened before, just like I bet a day-trader who ran on margin has lost all of his savings, house, cars, and wages through garnishment. That doesn't mean it's how 99% of situations, even in trading on margin, goes.
Even as it relates to underage dealers - even the stupid ones, a very few amount of teens buy in bulk - let alone do it only to fail on sales and get coerced into crime for payback. Not to downplay, the old "ATL" story like that is definitely real shit for illicit drug selling. But for vapes/alcohol/sanctioned (but legal and readily-available) substances? C'mon now. The market's there, but the incentives for coercion (due to the commodities being readily-available) are not.
I'd sooner assume that a story like that is a teen that's making a BS "blame the system" excuse for the fact that they actually bought vapes in bulk, squared it away, wanted to make more money than that hustle could offer, and voluntarily graduated to higher crime on their own. Fair play if they pull the excuse off, though - they've got us talking about it.
Everything you said is wrong. Refillable vapes are around the same price as disposables and kids get them from gas station attendants that don't care. What's this about organized crime?
Even in the US, selling to kids is illegal in most states, so the same issue applies: kid can't buy vape at store, kid goes to adult who is likely to be criminal to get them to buy for them, now kid is vulnerable to exploitation.
There's a pretty amazing video where a guy makes an entire functioning e-bike battery out of disposable vapes that he gathered around a music festival. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcVp9T8f_W4
I can't fathom why disposables are legal. Really believed that the post-boomer generations actually gave a damn about waste.
I like to start doing like this, but as you can see I'm like most people here don't have experience on electrical or electronic equipment
do you have an idea where I can start doing shit like this??? not up to professional of course but as a hobby where I don't need to electrocute myself would be nice
Building an e-bike battery from some random trash is a terrible idea. You won't electrocute yourself, but you are very likely to burn down your house when one of these cells randomly decides to ignite.
That we somehow decided that it's OK to design these to be used only once feels wrong.
But clearly they can be reused, so maybe it's better that they be thrown away by the unknowing, giving those who do know a source of cheap (as in free) electronics?
I wouldn’t want to be the lawyer who one day will have to argue how a device with USB C and a rechargeable battery can be classified as “disposable”.
I thought the point of making them like this was that they technically are reusable, so they can sell them (to people who for some reason keep buying them and throwing them away!) in places where disposable vapes are banned.
I'm confused by why anybody would buy one of these when entirely reusable versions exist, but then vaping seems unwise to me in general except as a way to quit tobacco.
Vaping nicotine doesn't seem that bad to me. AFAICT the dangers outside simple addictiveness are moderate lung irritation and cardiovascular effects, but no strong evidence of cancer caused by vaping alone - far better than cigarettes, and still better than an equivalent drinking problem.
Vaping causes inflammation, nicotine suppresses the immune system (which is probably pretty bad news for fighting any other diseases), and nicotine cessation has been linked with an increase in development of autoimmune disorders in the 12-24 month period after quitting.
I had elevated white blood cells counts and I developed an autoimmune condition a few months after quitting vaping. I had good health record leading up to it and no family history of any autoimmune disorders. White blood cells eventually normalized but autoimmune is forever, although it's under control and I'm lucky that it was caught early.
In the final ~4 years of vaping I didn't use any flavorings either, just 70/30 mix of VG/PG and nicotine.
It's not terrible as far as vices go, much less harmful than the alternatives, but it's definitely not as harmless as I thought going in. I wish I hadn't started and went for the ADHD assessment right away instead of subconsciously self-medicating with nicotine.
> linked with an increase in development of autoimmune disorders in the 12-24 month period after quitting
No shit, I had no idea.
That explains a lot. I quit smoking (well, the first time I tried to quit) when I was 19 (2 years smoking). 3 months later I was in the hospital with sclerosing mesenteritis, a rare disorder for an older person but baffling and way out of left-field for a 19 year old with no prior history autoimmune issues. We only got a diagnosis after full exploratory surgery that earned me a six inch incision scar on my stomach.
Word. I quit nicotine and it triggered auto immune response, I got celiac disease.
Never touched it ever again and I had to stop eating like a normal person. No more fast food for the rest of my life.
I don't think adequate studies have taken a look into the long term effects of all the solvents and oils they use aside from the nicotine. Intuitively, this just seems like a terrible idea putting non-water-soluble vapors into your lungs but I am definitely not a doctor.
It's not exactly a wild list. You can make your own mint vape liquid at home by combining 1 part vegetable glycerin with 1 part glycol, dissolving nicotine salt to the desired concentration (most dangerous part due to nicotine's toxicity, suggest getting it pre-dissolved in either one or both of the above), then dissolving menthol in to taste.
Don't get me wrong: it's not good for you, but it's a lot less bad for you than cigarettes, and it's not some great mystery as to what's in it.
This is why to me it’s so damn disappointing to me that vaping is targeted so forcefully by the various scolds in the “regulate everything” camp when smoking isn’t yet eradicated. Things like banning flavor and stuff. They want it to be as unpleasant as tobacco, which reduces the likelihood of people switching from tobacco to vaping, killing many of those smokers as a way to “save” teens from taking up an overall not-very-dangerous habit.
I vaped for around 8 years, about 4 years with typical flavorings and the last 4 years unflavored. IME unflavored vaping really isn't that bad, I accidentally switched to it because I ran out of flavoring one time and after a few days I didn't really miss them anymore so I just stopped using them.
I would compare it to people who drink soda all day, they can't fathom how people can drink "boring" plain water all day and they have a really hard time switching, but people who are used to drinking water find it as refreshing and satisfying as anything.
I think these flavorings cause more harm by luring young people to start vaping than they help smokers by luring them away from cigarettes. In an ideal world adults would be allowed to vape whatever they want, and teens wouldn't be able to get their hands on vapes in any capacity, but clearly that's not working so I think that flavor bans are a decent compromise.
I don't buy the argument that flavor bans will make teens go back to smoking. Cigarettes taste awful, they make you smell terrible, they irritate your lungs far more, they're far more expensive. If I was a teen I would still pick up unflavored vaping over cigarette smoking any time, but I'd be less likely to get into vaping without the flavorings.
> A third of UK teenagers who vape will go on to start smoking tobacco, research shows, meaning they are as likely to smoke as their peers were in the 1970s.
> The findings suggest that e-cigarettes are increasingly acting as a “gateway” to nicotine cigarettes for children, undermining falling rates of teen smoking over the past 50 years.
As an adult with a vaping habit, I can see how that happens. If you're a kid, and thus have unstable access to nicotine vapes (because they're illegal for you to buy), you'll be highly motivated to get your nicotine fix from something if your source of vape liquid dries up. Since cigarettes are more common, the result is a kid being likely to smoke sometimes.
Same thing happens to me (albeit far, far less frequently) when I'm out at the bars with my friends until 2am when I discover I'm out of juice. Since vape shops tend to keep normal retail hours, I'm limited on getting my fix from whatever the 7/11 is selling. If that's Marlboro reds, I'm probably going to smoke a cigarette or two.
Key difference between it being a "gateway drug" and not is the fact that I'll end up throwing away that pack the next day when I can refill my vape. Because smoking sucks in comparison. Not only on health grounds (not a huge concern for most nicotine addicts), but on basic grounds like "making you smell like shit", "hurting your throat", "tasting bad", and "not having the oppurtunity to be used nearly as frequently".
Maybe I'm just an old geeser but when I went back to grad school I was absolutely shocked at how many people vaped, and it seemed to have been because they started smoking flavored vapes. People would go to a party, either in high school or college, and the party would be permeated by some sweet smell. Curious kids/people would investigate, try vaping, and eventually get their own, becoming addicted.
As far as I can tell, banning flavored vapes has had a significant impact on reducing vaping/smoking new users, which is the ultimate goal. People who are currently addicted should primarily be motivated to quit, not find better tasting alternatives
Counter-point: For someone who's used to smoking or vaping, the craving to "take a puff" can be a very strong, maybe stronger than the chemical dependence on nicotine itself.
I noticed that in myself when I was trying to quit, vaping nicotine-free liquids helped my cravings more than nicotine itself. It didn't help the physical withdrawal symptoms but it mysteriously stopped the cravings for a while.
i have owned lots. they taste better than most permanent vapes. ive tried the whole buy all the best components and perfect juices etc with various tanks of different flavours. disposables just work and taste good, no leaks. they also have a logical end point like a pack of cigarettes. Its nice to switch flavour more frequently, and the packet/vape body colours pressed deep monkey brain buttons for fruit etc
Yeah, the sweetener they put in the disposables is like crack. If a liquid could replicate it then the switch to reusable would be a no brainer, but I never found one. Alas I switched to nicotine gum and haven’t looked back.
50mg/ml disposable vape liquid tasting better than the freebase stuff is a crazy take. I haven't met a single person who was there before the modern disposable trash that doesn't think it's markedly worse. It tastes like gas station vape juice circa 2012.
Good reusable systems have been around for 10 years now. Disposables sell well because people like to think that they can quit whenever they want without having to abandon an investment (never mind that the investment in a refillable system is literally cheaper than a single disposable vape in many cases).
gas station vape juice circa 2012 seems like a touch exaggerated. ive extensively researched making my permanent vape setup taste as good, and its down to the amount and type of sweetener used which doesnt seem to be available.
ive even bought the brand of liquid owned by the disposable company with the same branding. it's just not quite there.
you also have to accept the market for them, according to what you have said above shouldnt exist, but it does
I did the math and Juul was 47x more expensive than the liquids (this is in Canada). Then I switched to the juice vapes, and finally to kick the juice vaping I picked up pipe tobacco. Pipe tobacco is way cheaper than cigs nevermind vapes, the highest quality, and tastes incredibly good (also, you can also get that "first cigarette headrush" every time if you like by inhaling, works every time).
I used to love the smell of my Grandfather's pipe smoke. I still enjoy the occasional 2nd-hand smell of a rollup. Is pipe tobacco different to rollies?
Substantially. It is way more coarse, usually much more moist as well. Tends to be more “pure” tobacco with less additives, though I’m sure that’s not universal. I know somebody who does not smoke but buys it to keep in cabinets and various drawers because they love the smell. I must admit I am partial to the smell as well.
What the other guy said. Do yourself a favour and pickup some Mr. B's Crème brûlée just to smell it. It's like the best thing I've ever smelt even outside of tobacco. It's not an acquired taste where if you say something smells amazing it's implied that it's within the range of something objectively nasty.
Because reusable versions are a hassle. Cleaning, Charging, Changing Batteries, Changing liquid, etc. Whereas with reusable, well, you just puff and worry about nothing. Which is why people vape in the first place :)
Reasonable people already reused single-use bags. Trashcan liners, dog walk bags, cat scoop bags, etc.
Having recently been reminded that it used to be common to see eviscerated VHS tapes by roads, I've been reminded that we'll always have people who litter.
I’m not sure what your point is: because one type of litter is reduced, it doesn’t matter because people still litter in other ways?
In every place where plastic bags are banned, there’s a dramatic and obvious reduction in the amount of them clogging up trees, roads, fields, waterways, etc. If people need them for other purposes, they can buy them, while everyone else who doesn’t need them, doesn’t.
Yep, every so often I remember staring out the window on the highway in the car as a kid and seeing single use bags snagged on fences or trees pretty much anywhere inaccessible or not routinely cleaned.
I also catch it on B roll footage in movies or shows from the 90s/2000s a lot. It’s a specific type of visual blight I rarely ever see after those ultra flimsy single use bags that could be carried dozens of miles on a gentle breeze were eliminated.
(This children's book was written basically at the tail end of the era where seeing a bag flying could conjure the imagination)
Many single use bags come with holes in them or develop them after a single trip hauling boxes with sharp corners home. Making the plastic a little thicker makes it last many times longer.
The majority of people reuse those bags, they're pretty great actually. Most people I know have slightly more expensive bags made out of fabric though.
Not here. Standing in line at stores like target that have them I see maybe 1/20 people checking out in front of me bring in reused disposable sacks, while 15/20 leave with new ones. Certainly not enough reuse to justify the extra thickness.
We get most of our groceries through Drive Up services, where you place an order the day before and they bring the groceries to your car. Through a combination of a new disability, and a new baby in our family, the convenience is well worth the price (free).
But now every week we have more and more reusable bags that we can't find any use for, so we recycle a bunch each quarter. (And even that is questionable, when they are covered in impossible-to-remove stickers.)
You've misunderstood the assignment if you don't reuse those, they are perfectly fine for that and will last a long time. Just have one in your bag or car. I've even reused paper bags for more than half a year since the ban.
They do, but they still don’t make it back to the stores enough, and nobody has 16 wastebaskets to line every week. Also the old ones were just as suitable for wastebasket duty.
The bag laws have done nothing but increase the consumption of plastic, since stores still go through nearly as many, but they’re 5x thicker now.
> The current data provided by the main retailers for the reporting year 2024 to 2025 shows a reduction of almost 98% on the annual number of single-use carrier bags sold since the charge was introduced. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/carrier-bag-charg...
5x thicker is still a net win.
And it was less about reducing plastic consumption and more about reducing plastic pollution. 1000 tonnes of plastic in a landfill and incinerators (because the heavier bags are more likely to be reused even just as bin bags) is better than 200 tonnes blowing around and decaying into environmental microplastics.
In terms of total plastic consumption, 8 billion plastic bags (what the UK used before the charge) is maybe between 20000 and 40000 tonnes depending on thickness. Which is pretty minor on the scale of plastic usage considering how much plastic crap and packaging was and still is used.
The only time I even get one of those things is if I forget my regular bag or I buy too much stuff to fit. That happens like once a month.
Why are you going into the store empty handed and coming out with 16 plastic bags?
Not everyone is you. 16 is mild hyperbole, but I'm not even speaking normatively on what people should do. I'm speaking about what people do do. I'll stipulate that everyone including me should always keep at least 10 bags in my car so that I can do about 2 typical shopping trips even if I forget to put them back in the car. And we should always remember to carry them in. But that isn't happening with the current hilariously poor incentives in place (50 measly cents to buy 5 bags and no bag deposit either.)
I predict that if you spend 10 minutes observing the checkouts in your supermarket you'll see exactly what I see: At least 75% of people buying new plastic bags for the transaction, and zero people depositing bags into the special bag recycling bin at the store - which in the US is basically the only place this type of plastic is even accepted for recycling.
And again, these bags appear to be 3-5x as thick as the old bags, so the bag law is a huge win for Big Plastic who sells more plastic than they used to, and it mostly goes into the landfill.
The solutions:
• Admit this is a failed policy
• Everyone everywhere stops being imperfect, forgetful and lazy -- 100% of the time.
California is still hoping for the latter to pan out!
If you have a family and a grocery store in walking distance you can do it easily; I would hit 16 if I forgot my shopping bag - which I do on occasion.
The coil is part of the pod and therefore user-replaceable. The point of a pod system is to keep the coil and liquid in a self-contained system, which practically eliminates the risk of liquid leaks. All of these quasi-disposable vapes with replaceable pods and a charging port can be re-used hundreds of times.
I don't know why people dispose of the whole thing rather than just changing the pod, but at least it's a boon for electronics hobbyists.
Growing up, smoking was quite common. A lot can change in 20-30 years, so I'm cautiously optimistic that maybe vaping will eventually become as socially unacceptable as smoking.
If you're in the EU/UK the WEEE directive means anywhere selling them should take them back like-for-like to be directed into the correct waste stream. (they get paid some of the deposit on them to do so)
I would be more fine with disposable vapes like this if almost all of them were recovered somehow, for the amount it subsidises production of Li-ion batteries.
That's the theory. I practice, even in famously recycling-obsessed Germany, it's impossible to return electronics in places that are required to accept them, even two years after that law passed. The staff is really confused when you try.
Theoretically a high enough deposit could probably “fix the problem.” Like, if the empty was worth a $25 deposit most people would 100% take them back to the store. It would be annoying for people to have the high deposit, but it’s really a one-time expense.
On the other hand at least in the US, a deposit of a buck or two wouldn’t do much. California has that for cans and bottles, yet only maybe 10% of people turn them in. Most end up in curbside recycling (which doesn’t refund) or the garbage, indicating people don’t care about getting their nickel or dime back.
Where I live in CA, many end up going to some stranger who rifles through everybody's curbside recycling bin before trash day. It's sad that times are hard, and this is the side job we've accidentally invented.
No, it’s there because the battery can’t hold enough charge for the ratio of vape liquid they put in it. So you get 2-3 full charges and it runs out of liquid.
They represent the most viable pathway for big tobacco to exit regular cigarettes, which are in decline or at least struggling. AND vapes have huge traction with younger people. It's basically The Thing that big tobacco needs to go all in on if they want to keep selling carcinogenic air to people for the next 50 years
Yes, like all tobacco products. These days a lot of marketing is targeted and subtle, especially for an industry used to dealing with advertising restrictions.
Probably not, unless there are very specific substances in the liquid being vaped.
There are two known culprits: diacetyl is/was used in some flavorings for its buttery taste, and liquid Vitamin E oil was used in clandestinely produced THC vape cartridges (which are really not relevant for the topic at hand). Both of those have largely disappeared from the market.
Sure, some cheap components can in theory leach heavy metals into liquids. The amounts are insignificant compared to what you will be breathing in just by walking on city streets, even outside rush hour.
And at least vapes don’t contain polonium-210 like cigarettes do.
The current state of technology is ... weird. From AI doing our art instead of our work, to hosting a website on an eCigarette. "Weird" is the only word I can think of at this moment.
This reminds me of when I was a kid, taking apart toys just to keep the tiny motors and circuit boards like treasures. Now as an adult, seeing someone pull a full working system out of a disposable vape to run a website feels like the same kind of magic. Maybe this is what romance looks like in the tech world.
The micro in this thing is a WQFN-16 (W = very very thin, thinner than V for very) with 3x3x0.75mm body. That's around a fiftieth of a gram of plastic.
I think the bigger SOIC chip is probably the battery charge IC. And then maybe a gram or two of PCB epoxy. And the plastic in the battery pouch and membranes which you need anyway.
In terms of plastics waste volume, the casing and tank is probably nearly all of the content. So the problem is a disposable vape bring a thing at all, not really the microcontroller in there.
It feels mad and somehow wasteful that you can get a CPU at that price point, but the die itself is a tiny sliver of silicon. You can even embed an (even tinier) and weedier application-specific) IC in a paper metro ticket. Compute is just so ridiculously cheap that you can have a hundred of functional ICs for the cost of a single largish cup of hot bean water.
There's more silicon in the battery charge controller probably (bigger transistors). The MCU is just a speck.
Ironically making these disposable vapes "reusable" causes more e-waste as now they need a connector and charge controller and a bigger PCB.
You’re seriously considering that inhaling vapor of nicotinized smoke machine liquid is equally bad as inhaling 700-1200 Celsius combustion products containing microparticles and radioactive isotopes?
I get that people want to scare kids, but that level of hyperbole is way overkill and has the opposite psychological effect on those who can think for themselves.
I always forget about the idea that IPv6 was intended to allow literally everything to have an address. The mouse, keyboard, display, etc. Seems like a bad idea now, but back then it was considered as part of the overall plan for the nearly infinite space. Maybe the joke is still missing a punchline. We've had this generic device interface for decades but decided on proprietary and arbitrary standards of device communication to make our lives easier in the short-term.
By law, neither electronics nor batteries can be disposed of with generic waste. This is the case in the EU, at least. So how are people then disposing these devices?
Disclaimer: I do know the answer, but I'd rather pretend that people actually follow the law.
3kb of RAM and 24kb of flash is a bit tight for Doom unfortunately. It has been ported to another Cortex-M0+ microcontroller, the RP2040, but that has 264kb of RAM plus megabytes of flash and the game still barely fits.
I used to see disposable vapes dumped on the street until they were banned (thankfully). All those wasted batteries and microcontrollers is really wasteful.
This is really impressive. I laughed when I got 503 Unavailable on the hosted URL. I guess we're all hugging that little vape CPU a little too hard. :)
That's gotta be between 75 and 90% less damaging to humanity than the designed use of a disposable vape. Well done, Bogdan!
I'm reminded of the project Tom7 put together a few years back where he used the surplus components inside a digital COVID kit as spare memory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio
> This may not come as a surprise, but Linux (and with some tweaking even macOS) supports SLIP.
Anyone have any experience with SLIP for macOS? Curious if the author was actually able to make that work, I’ve been looking into something similar the past few weeks with no luck.
so I had to throw nginx in front of it so my little router wouldn't explode, but I hope some people will get to experience the relaxing loading experience live.
So a question maybe someone can clue me in on here: while the specs on that MCU seem imminently reasonable to me (especially compared to some of the PIC12F and similar I've used in the past) the thing that feels odd is the high clock speed ARM core. Is it really that cheap and easy to drop an M0 core or ip block into an MCU? Why not more RAM and a simpler/slower core? The M0 feels grossly overkill.
I never thought I'd see someone turn a vape into a web server. Totally absurd but also kind of brilliant. I probably won’t remember the technical details, but that ‘why not just try it’ attitude is seriously contagious.
Want to fit a web server into a speck of dust?
Check out smews ( https://github.com/2xs/smews ) it runs with just 8k of flash and 512 bytes of RAM, supports HTTP 1.1 over TCP/IP, SLIP or others, with both static and dynamic content (GET and POST)
The code is 18 years old and hasn’t moved in 10, A sandbox for budding pentesters ;)
You think a Cortex-M0+ in a disposable vape is wasteful, wait until you see the ones with colour touchscreens and Bluetooth radios. It's probably only a matter of time before they start running Android on them.
This is cool, but, man, I felt like such a pathetic excuse for a human being when, brutally craving nicotine, with my vape empty of the fruit-flavoured juice that I am literally addicted to like the stupid pathetic baby that I am, and stuck with the cravings because all the shops are closed until morning, and so, in need of a distraction, I opened Hacker News. FFS.
Sometimes the only option is to laugh at your own expense! Clearly this is a sign. I should buy more juice next time. And maybe start smoking more actual cigs.
Quitting smoking was the best decision I made and I wish I did it earlier. If you feel ready Allen Carr's book worked for me. I wasted so much time smoking.
Thanks man, appreciate it, and kudos for stopping.
I might quit, I guess, when my fiancee has to for pregnancy, should it eventually stop being funny to tell her how wonderful each individual cigarette I smoke is. But I really, really love smoking - more than any of my other hobbies, wholesome or otherwise.
I'm sure that'll change, and I'll look that book up if and when it does. Thanks again.
I've been (I am?) addicted to many substances, from fruit-flavoured nicotine juice through to heroin.
I find self-deprecating humour useful, personally. It helps me not wallow, to take the cravings less seriously. I of course wouldn't say the same about anyone who isn't me.
Because, as you say, someone who has an addiction isn't lesser than anyone else. It's a state of being that requires an awful lot of strength.
That said, having to use that strength on 'mango e-liquid' is, I think, funny in an absurdist way. We live in strange times!
No - that's what the drugs are for. Only joking (for real).
I appreciate that, thank you. And I can totally see how my comment above might read patronising to people dealing with shit that is functionally much, much worse than the situation I described, so I appreciated the opportunity to right that, also.
We are truly living in the precursor to some cyberpunk fever dream with this. Give it a few years and we’ll be smokin’ grandma & grandpa’s uploads out of vapes.
I wonder how much cost would be added if they included a small usb storage drive in those things. You could incentivize non-disposal because people would have a million of those things.
Add a GPS and a few propellers to vapes so they can fly themselves directly into the nearest river, lake or (as a last resort) ocean once they're empty.
The Addictive Stuff™ is literally the core feature of the item. Your comment makes it sound like the producers are nefariously and covertly adding nicotine to a product which normally would not have any? It's like saying "These scoundrel breweries! They're making beer that gets you drunk!"
I mean disposable vapes are just complete idiocy to begin with.
Vapes with pods are less expensive in the long run and offer a vastly superior vaping experience. You can get liquid for dirt cheap. If you smoke heavily, you might offset the initial investment in a week or two.
Disposable vapes offer zero advantages. They are only good if you want to "just try" it once or that is what you are going to tell yourself in your career of producing e-waste.
What they offer is ubiquity and the turnkey nature.
You can walk into any nearby smoke shop, get one and use it immediately. You don't have to carry around a bottle of liquid and extra coils and paper towels/napkins for the inevitable leak.
I stopped vaping a little while ago but when I did vape, there was no clear standard of pod systems. You sure could walk into a nearby smoke shop but it was unlikely that you'd find your ideal pod/coil/liquid.
It's hard to take back the convenience people have gotten used to. I think one idea could be that disposable vapes become recyclable vapes. They should cost $15 more and buyers should get back $10 when they return it for recycling. This is nicotine we're talking about so the buyer is always coming back anyway.
While I do believe that disposable vapes should be banned even if they happen to be more convenient, I really don't see it. When I vaped myself I liked having a re-usable vape so much more than the disposable crap.
With the disposable it would always be a gamble how long they would last. I don't get how people manage. Do they buy multiples at once and carry them around?
It was so much more convenient to carry that small bottle of liquid with me and have the peace of mind that I wouldn't run out of juice for the night. Never had issues with spilled liquid.
Not having a standard for pods sucks but you don't need to buy them that often. I just ordered them online anyway.
Of course it might be a bit of a cultural difference as well. Most of my smoker friends roll their own cigarettes which is way more inconvenient.
I respect the point about not wanting to send the manufacturer any business, but I would love to know the brand so I'd know which ones to rescue if given the chance.
I am probably stupid so bear with me. I don't get the part about not naming brands if you are certain they won't ever sponsor you. I feel like it just hurts the value of the article with nothing gained
It's not about sponsorships and integrity, it's about preventing the pipeline "Person reads article -> Sees this brand of vape has micocontrollers -> Buys this brand of vape".
(If I understood the author correctly, y'know, not to speak for them)
Contributing to people buying stuff that's bad for them, and giving money to an industry that profits off it, presumably? Again, I'm just assuming the author's position(which, for the record I do not share) here.
don't worry about speaking for the author. I want to gather as many explanations of this as possible because none of them seem to be consistent and make much sense. I feel like people do this because others do it too without much questioning.
With your example, why would the author care whether some random person buys the vape he mentioned in his article? I don't see the point
Apparently they're cheap because they're a flash memory company that bolts a little CPU onto their own flash, rather than a CPU company having to then buy the more expensive flash with a markup.
I've actually been trying to look into something similar? I have a pile of old vapes from friends/family I want to re-purpose, but don't really know where to start.
I don't understand the hardware setup. There is a usb-c port and they talk about usb serial devices which could be a usb to serial port, but what is after that? There are no pictures of it connected.
Someone in a different forum said it was a usb to serial port then on a pc a network port was forwarded to the serial port, but it is very unclear in the article.
Maybe, I'm not sure how you would connect a debugger to qemu, and you would have to emulate the ram and flash, but other than that is pretty standard arm cortex m0. The code is pretty generic too.
I found of these that had a built-in retro game console with screen. Like, the kind of little game that a small child would be interested in. So frustrating.
What were you doing to get traffic from the open Internet to your webserver at home? I always felt that was a risky proposition, but I might just be stupid.
I've hosted at home for years and if you have it properly setup it's not any more risky than using a VPS. I have 443 open on my router and basically all web traffic is routed to a container on my server. The container is on an isolated vlan and basically runs nginx as a ssl reverse proxy.
The actual web services behind the proxy run in their own containers and with proper isolation and firewall rules the effects of a security compromise are limited. At most an attacker will be able to take over the containers with an exploit (and they could do that with a VPS as well) but they won't be able to access the rest of the network or my secure internal systems.
If I was this guy and wanted to let people connect directly to my vapeserver I would simply host it on another vlan and port forward the HTTP connection. Even if someone manages to take over such an obscure system they're not going to be able to do much.
> What were you doing to get traffic from the open Internet to your webserver at home? I always felt that was a risky proposition,
How times change.
Once nearly every self respecting IT pro ran servers from there home network. The modern drive to outsource and consolidate the interweb to a handful of big players I find rather odd; perhaps even counterproductive in the long run.
Done it since before I properly knew what I was doing. Haven't had issues. Even though n=1, also now that I'm actually working in IT security, I don't think the risk was ever much bigger than what I could oversee
The main thing is that, if someone gets onto the server system, then they're in my network and they can do attacks on other devices in that LAN (guest wifis are a nice way to isolate that nowadays; that didn't exist back when I started). Same as when I take my laptop to school for example, then others can reach it. I've had issues with others in school doing attacks because the internet was unencrypted http back then (client-side hashing in JavaScript limited the impact though), but not from anyone who tried to hack into the server. Only automated scans for outdated Wordpress, setup files for Phpmyadmin, ssh password guessing... the things they simply try blindly on every IP address. If any of this is successful, you're most likely going to be turned into a spam-sending server or a DDoS zombie; not something with lasting impact once you discover the issue and remove the malware
Most attackers don't do targeted attacks on your system or network unless you're a commercial entity that presumably can pay a nice ransom, or are a high-profile individual. Attackers aiming for consumers send phishing emails and create phishing advertisements, look for standard password vaults if you run their malware, try using stolen credentials on Steam and hope you've got a payment method stored... the usual old things. Having a server doesn't make any of those attacks easier, and besides, self hosting is very uncommon. Even if you and I had a similar enough setup at home with a straightforward path to exploitation, it's a few thousand people that self-host in a country with millions of people. It's not worth developing attacks for
VPS with public ipv4, connected to home network over Tailscale and forward the traffic with socat. You'd probably be fine opening a port directly but a small VPS is free most places so might as well make the most of it.
Could you elaborate more on the "a small VPS is free"? Except Oracle's free tier offer, I am not aware of others; I'd appreciate it if you could point me in the right direction.
For this I used GCP free tier -- not sure why everyone acts like Oracle are the only free tier around when GCP and AWS offer always-free tiers too. It's just runing socat to forward to the vape over tailscale. Is there something I'm missing?
GCP outbound data is limited to 1GB/mo and I believe by default it doesn't have any cap, it will just charge for additional traffic with the credit card you are required to enter in order to get a free tier account. So I would be careful publishing anything with it.
I'm not sure where to go for the free VPS, other than Oracle Cloud, as you mention, but a Cloudflare tunnel will get traffic into your LAN even behind CGNAT or other nonsense.
You can put the public facing stuff on a separate VLAN and have firewall rules that don’t give the VLAN access to LAN stuff. I only know how to do this with IPv4 though, IPv6 confuses me and I’m scared to get it wrong so I disabled it.
Running at 24 Mhz, the vape is umpteen times faster but interestingly enough the AGC had 36 KiB of ROM while the vape only has 24 KiB. Umpteen is a technical term denoting that a straight comparison isn't possible, as the Cortex M0 does more in a single clock cycle than the AGC does but they're also different architectures and the programs running are different.
Talking of cheap and powerful devices one can also look at Chinese UZ801 4G LTE (Qualcomm MSM8916) dongles. They cost like only $4-5 and pack quite impressive HW: 4GB eMMC, 512MB RAM, actual 4G modem sometimes with 2 sim switching support. Since it's actually old Android SOC there is even GPU and GPS in there. And a lot of work was already done on supporting them:
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Zhihe_series_LTE_dongles_...
https://github.com/OpenStick/OpenStick
So yeah if you looking for hardware platform for weird homelab projects that's can be it.
I've found [1] to be the best guide for getting started with them; you need to make a copy of the firmware partitions that you re-flash after installing Linux onto it in order to get the 4G modem working. It's honestly absurd how much you're getting for a fiver with it; add a power bank (or make your own from scavenged vape batteries in the spirit of this post) and you have a full Linux machine with WiFi and 4G that can work almost anywhere.
[1] https://wvthoog.nl/openstick/
What an interesting gadget! It looks like it has most of the features of an Orange Pi Zero, but at around 1/5th of the price.
it's almost like everything matching the pi footprint is severely overpriced!
There's a silver lining in raspberry pi and it's clones being so relatively expensive: they create a market and demand for hackable devices. In an age with so much pressure to plug every single digital hole, these devices bring some much needed market pressure to the opposite direction.
Or, put another way: to have electronics so cheap today, we're sacrificing empowerment technology could give us. We have dirt cheap supercomputers in our pocket, but what for? They're just overspecced entertainment machines.
Gotta pay for the cop doing surveillance device r&d somehow...
https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/09/rpi_maker_in_residenc...
The original Raspberry Pi Zero was a good deal at $5 or even at $10. Too bad it was always poorly available and mostly bundled with overpriced dongles, power supplies, SD cards etc.
The poor avaialbility was largely due to the great pricing: small commercial users scooped them up in the largest quanitites that they could because they were so competative against other options both in terms of pricce and having the advantage of decent support¹ unlike other inexpensive SoCs. Max-per-customer limits imposed by some distributors were not hard to get around. That meant it was difficult for the individual tinkerers that they were aimed at to get hold of them. And once an availability gap was spotted in the market the scalpers crowded in, so even those commercial users had trouble getting them at RRP.
If the current models were any cheaper, that might happen again. It is one of those places where the infamous “what the market will bare” works against us: unless you are buying in bulk you have the choice between paying more or having no availability at all.
People are willing to pay more the rPi units because of the support¹ and reliability². I know I am, last time I wanted a small unit like that I went straight for an rPi without even looking at the other options that might have been cheaper.
--------
[1] official + community
[2] While not perfect in that regard, no supplier is, and the Pis do seem to do better than others in that regard, especially when compared to anything noticable less expensive.
> The poor avaialbility was largely due to the great pricing:
the poor availability was because they didnt make enough. they blame supply chain issues around covid. in the time they were complaining that it wasnt their fault, competitors like the esp32 started appearing and taking market share. i was totally put off the rpi because of that saga. its no longer a good deal, there are better options in either direction (more microcontrollery or more power)
> the poor availability was because they didnt make enough.
I mean, yeah, that is obvious. But for early products, especially when the level of demand is greater than expectations as it was for both the early Pi and PiZero variants, it is sometimes impractical to ramp up production and supply chains fast enough. If they had made a pile more before release and demand hadn't been that high they would have gone bust with a load of stock in warehouses.
> they blame supply chain issues around covid
You've got your timeline very compressed there. The first couple of Pi Zero variants (this thread started with “The original Raspberry Pi Zero was…”) and supply issues associated with them, were around quite a bit before the effects of C19 and the associated supply chain problems. The Pi Zero 2 was released during the time when the chip shortage and related problems were biting, but the previous version was released a couple of years before 2020 and the first version a couple of years before that.
From what I've read online somewhere, Zero was a loss leader product made with input from Eric Schmidt, intended to be sold along attractive accessories. The Pi Foundation did try briefly but wasn't able to come up with the accessories, leading to that poor availability and WH variants that made little sense.
what you're generally paying for is support and community. havin people you can ask questions and knowing there's a good chance that soneone out there has both seen your issue and knows a fix is extremely valuable and worth the money if you're just trying to put together a small one off project.
I like the picos. I think there’s a lot of bang for your buck in there for making little devices and prototyping.
Isn't Orange Pi Zero already sold at cost of material & labor?
> or make your own from scavenged vape batteries in the spirit of this post
On this note, anyone got a tut or links to where I can get an appropriate charge controller/BMS (UK) to do this?
Like the post's author, I've been collecting vape batteries for a while and would love to build a power bank or use them in some IoT projects.
Aliexpress. A simple TP4056 usb-c charging board costs as little as 50p. For a few pence more you can get a power bank board with a charge controller and a 5v boost converter.
Interesting, I have some TP4056 already, but wouldn't I need some form of "balance" circuitry if I want to connect multiple of these together, to ensure they're all charged and discharged evenly?
In case anyone wants a few links containing this SOC or similar, there's an entire article on Hackaday and a bunch of links shared in the comments:
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/03/hackable-20-modem-combines-l... (search for Alibaba/Aliexpress/Amazon)
Before stumbling on this link I actually found one that mentions a MSM8916 in the description (it even has a screen, sadly no RAM information):
https://aliexpress.com/item/1005007496178143.html
> Qualcomm MSM8916
Well hullo there, turns out that's my old mate, the Snapdragon 410! Quite an unexpected surprise!
And funnily in retrospect, my Moto G3 from 2015 (which I still occasionally use for whatsapp!) has the exact same processor, and turns out base android (7) is (un?)surprisingly efficient when you're not doing much! I totally believe you could get a lightweight linux distro going on; I'm more impressed by such an old (and mobile!) chipset still having some sort of vestigial support!
(Fun fact, iirc this was one of the first processors to get 64 bit support for android but motorola wasn't able to port it over in time for the launch. Hence it runs 32 bit android instead!)
Quad core 64-bit 1.2 GHz are you serious?
> 4GB eMMC, 512MB RAM
And, that Snapdragon is 1.4 GHz, I think.
That's enough for a bare-bones WordPress installation.
My first laptop had a 100 MB had drive, 8 MB of RAM, and a 25 MHz processor, and I remember running a web server on it too, in addition to Windows 3.11 and word processors and other software. One of those dongles would have been godlike power back in those days.
I feel like somewhere along the way scripting got out of hand. Stuff like Wordpress is absurdly resource intensive.
Hm, thanks for the idea, but I rather want a minimal node environment on that usb dongle server now.
Let's not overhype those days. I had a P1 166MHz and playing an MP3 meant everything else would have to be closed, if I'd open Word the song would stutter. Not all modern processing power is wasted.
I could play mp3s on a 66Mhz CPU, though yes other tasks would make the playback stutter.
I was doing it on Win 95 or 98, maybe the OS was using more RAM than yours?
Possibly, I was on System 7.1.
My biggest Problem with these devices is
a.) the world of electronics is moving too fast
b.) My lack of skills and time to build something really cool with something like this
A while ago i bought a licheerv nano (similar to luckfox pico or Milk-v duo) to build an open source iPod nano via usb-c audio Jack and the open source buildroot for the licheerv nano.
I did not find a suitable 2.4 inch or at least < 3"touch display that worked with the integrated MPI port.
With LVGL it should be doable to build a small portable audioplayer with acceptable features... But not for me :-)
Where do you get them for $5? Cheapest I can find is around £8 (11 USD), and it’s not clear if they have this chip.
Yeah you won't find them for $5 unless you buy in bulk on Alibaba
Aliexpress has this as the best selling one though the chipset is not confirmed https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006924641101.html
Well I take my gamble, wait 2 weeks and see what I'll get
Just fyi, the device at that link is currently showing $9.62 for a single unit, once logged in and the one-time-only "Welcome deals" are eliminated. But AliExpress pricing can vary hour by hour based on seller, inventory, algorithm, RNG.
I've noticed the wild fluctuations in price as well (by $10), is there some trick to timing the RNG right? I'm guessing it's intentional to get you to keep refreshing.
I just bought one for $1.07 US with free shipping. I was buying with a new account so I probably got that discount. But even so, before buying I got $2.99 the first time I loaded the page, then $9.89 or thereabouts, and finally $0.99 (which I bought, it had an additional $0.08 in fees for $1.07 total). We’ll see if it shows up and is hackable, but at that price it feels too good to pass up the chance.
Which one did you buy, the red one or the white one? I do want a device that runs openstick, but I don't want more ewaste if it's the wrong one.
EDIT: According to this post[1] above, this listing[2] should be the real thing, as the red variant does say SSID 4G-UFI-XX under the cap.
[1] https://wvthoog.nl/openstick/ [2] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006860833351.html
Looks like both those are the same, judging by the review pictures too
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006924641101.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006860833351.html
They basically all come in 4-6 designs, but only difference is how easy it to get to edl / adb.
On some of them you just load debug webpage and on others you might need to ground some pins.
Well, I guess my post was slightly misguided on price because I bought them in South East Asia and they look a bit more pricey in EU / US now. Might be some tariff price changes played the role IDK.
As for the chip basically almost all USB+LTE+WIFI sticks on Chinese marketplaces using it. They all have slightly different way to get adb / edl and flash, but all seems somewhat open.
Now what I'd like to see is the other way around - you know, like the "old" UMTS sticks, just for 5G. No OS, especially not one so prone to all sorts of security like Android, just a pure baseband chip, some interface chip that talks USB3, two built-in antennas and the option to connect more powerful/higher directionality external antennas.
https://www.simcom.com/product/SIM8300G_M2.html
Speaking of cheap and powerful, I’m looking for a dirt cheap android phone that has a decent camera. I used to ship out GoPros to my customers but I don’t actually need them to film in 4K, 1080p with a decent CCD would be fine. And lately new GoPro models have become a pain to setup, they require pairing with a modern mobile phone which my customers sometimes don’t have.
Motorola Moto G is a very capable phone on the cheap. It's even cheaper if you don't mind older models or used.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=motorola+moto+g&qid=1757978993&rn...
I've bought a lot of moto g and I concur. Camera is decent. It won't blow your skirt up, but it is roughly comparable to flagship phones from a couple of years ago. YMMV of course
https://www.unihertz.com/collections/jelly-series
Where do i get a MSM8916 board for commercial usage at low volumes(1k)?
What about disassembling 1k dongles?
"What about disassembling 1k dongles?"
deadass this literally what they do in china, they just disassemble e-waste that don't get used and resell that oversees
A relative bought several products from Chinese company for a small product development. When he found the most suited device he asked if they'd sell without the enclosure, and maybe 1-2 other boards. They told him at 1000 pcs the best option was to buy them and toss the enclosure.
underrated comment, probably the way to go with an older chip and under 1k volumes.
And not even that hard to find: "alibaba MSM8916 LTE" on Google and lo and behold: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/TIANJIE-Qualcomm-MSM8...
$5.92 each for 500-2999 orders. What a time to be alive.
How much work is it to rip one of these open and reprogram?
I had looked into "properly" buying LCDs once, just in case it had been within trivial reach of mine and I could just do what I wanted to do.
The one I was interested in would come in couples of aluminized vacuum sealed bags in a cardboard box, with 2k panels per each bags, laid out on plastic trays and stacked few up. The standard procedure to use these things is to wipe the bag surface to remove contaminants, leave it 24 hours at the factory to equalize temperature to avoid causing condensation, then tear it, and put it through production line before the panels degrade from absorbing too much moisture in the air.
I suppose you can forget about surplus parts or just buy 1/n of 2k parts at n/1 price premium from manufacturers with quote-unquote-nonfunctional parts, should you be contractually required to do so, but the point is, you can't easily produce just 1k of something in excess of 10 or so of prototypes built of no-guarantee spare parts.
Unless the total cost of gutting and reprogramming work exceeds that of fulfilling MOQ amounts of few thousands total(including customer warranty spares, media and storefront demo units, investors thank you specials, lottery prizes and all), it's going to make more sense to just buy and gut existing things, than producing just 1k units.
probably 2 screws at most or some glue/snaps, then put a jtag brush over the contacts, do some sort of unit test and you have a unit. Could take a few hours with a motorized screwdriver and a simple specialized CLI program for programming/testing
Reminds me of the LTE dongles Freedom Pop would give out that were running Linux. If you took them apart you got UART access, too.
would be funny if you could make a drone with this, a flying vape, probably missing good sensors
Do any of the modem bands work in America? If so... what carrier?
I've heard T-mobile works well with Chinese phones
This would be so good for open source livestock tracker.
I chatter with a friend who works for this and bey built everything bespoke (tracking, temperature (good health indicator), steering (yes you can tell cows where to go), etc). My first question was - did you use some android platform?
Re-using this sort of device is super cool. I can imagine a post-apocalyptic scenario where a city is run on a hodgepodge of random computing devices like this.
I will say, though, disposable vapes with microcontrollers inside (and even full games and screens from recent reporting) are an egregious source of e-waste. Many layers of stupid are present here.
Another example: One-time covid tests with a microcontroller, optical sensor to read the result and bluetooth to connect to a phone to display the results. Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29698887
Don’t forget the Tom7 video[1] where he made a „hard drive“ from disposable Covid test kits.
[1] https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio?t=1560
I've been aware about the perfectly reusable lithium batteries inside these disposable vapes, which is egregious enough.
But the one in the FTA comes with a full fat microcontroller and USB-C connector! I'm not clear if these connectors are accessible outside or if you need to break open the packaging before being able to get to it.
Like you said: "Many layers of stupid are present here"
All that hardware must surely be worth more than half the value of the actual product!
>All that hardware must surely be worth more than half the value of the actual product!
I'm constantly struck at how bread (a pastry, say) in a plastic tray, wrapped in plastic, is so crazy to me. The effort and technology that went, and goes, into oil extraction and such - only to throw the packaging away immediately that I get home ... it's just so unsustainable.
I wonder when in the West we'll start mining rubbish dumps ('refuse sites' where household waste is buried)? Maybe we already have? I know in developing countries people spend their days manually picking over such places.
> I wonder when in the West we'll start mining rubbish dumps
Never, because we have virtually unlimited space for landfills, and landfill tech has quietly been improving over the last few centuries, to the point that landfills are cheap, non-polluting, and entirely carbon neutral. Countries with less land mass (Europe et al) prefer incineration (mainly to save space, despite it being significantly worse for the environment and much more expensive (although with the newer energy reclamation efforts this is getting better)).
IMO it's not worth worrying about landfills too much. Household waste makes up about 3% of total landfill waste (when you add commercial/industrial/agricultural) in North America. You and your bun wrapper are truly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
This is backwards, it's not about eliminating the landfill, it's about recovering the materials which were previously not scarce but now are or will be soon.
Oil-plastics will increase in cost as it becomes more scarce.
Bioplastics are increasingly popular, research is making it better and easier to produce, etc.
I don’t fret over a plastic wrap. For one, if it’s bread in a supermarket, I want it wrapped, I don’t want someone’s sneeze on it.
Plastic for fruits and veggies that you rinse, that’s absurd.
> carbon neutral
No. Poorly separated wastes in landfill cause non-trivial methane emissions and other VOCs [0]. While leachate _may_ be captured, most of the time methane is definitely not.
[0] - https://www.epa.gov/lmop/basic-information-about-landfill-ga...
For historic, sealed landfills, perhaps. Modern regulations require methane (LFG) capture for all non-trivially-sized landfills. In 2015, 74% of US household waste ended up in a landfill with a system to capture methane and convert it to energy[1], I suspect the number has increased over the last decade.
[1] https://ensoplastics.com/theblog/?p=2557
I think it’s less about managing the environmental impact of landfills and more about eventually the concentration of desirable materials in landfills may end up higher than in known natural deposits. Or at least easier to refine and separate.
Landfills are likely chock full of Aluminum, Nickel-Cadmium, Lithium, copper, brass, and all sorts of useful metals and chemicals.
Sure, the grand majority is going to be food waste, but if you threw it all into an incinerator and melted down the ashes there is probably a decent blend of valuable material mixed in with the waste.
You don't have separate collection for food (bio) waste?
In the states it depends on the city/county/state and their legislation.
Some places do, some don't.
Not sure how those are related. We only eat food coming in packaging comparable to transplanted organ because companies can't afford poisoning lawsuits because humans are so expensive.
Lots of people especially those generally "up north" undermine risks and therefore costs of food poisoning, but it's real. Haven't those people seen things growing molds?
How is plastic on bread related with food poisoning? Here in France baguettes are wrapped in paper and are eaten within a day or two of being made (or else they get dry). if you keep them for long enough, molds will grow on it, then you see them and don't eat that old bread (even though it's unlikely to be too bad for most people, the taste is certainly not great). I'd be surprised if anyone ever got food poisoned with bread.
> I'd be surprised if anyone ever got food poisoned with bread.
I'm about to blow your mind. It was and is one of the most common food poisoning types, especially B. Cereus and everyone's favorite religion-creator, C. purpurea / ergot.
Gross image warning (not sure why it's the first thing on the page but...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergotism
Right, I was really focusing on the bread itself, given the discussion was about the wrapping, rather than previous poisoning of ingredients (unless I'm mistaken, plastic wrapping would not help against ergotism). I'm sure people also get poisoned with chemicals they might put on the crops as well...
Bacillus Cereus is the major modern issue, and it largely comes from soggy bread/rice/pasta, so plastic is a significant factor.
I completely agree with you that we should, in general, phase out plastic as much as we can, but we have to be realistic about the benefits and drawbacks. I don't think it's anything that couldn't be replaced with oiled paper, but plastic is used for some good and bad reasons.
>Changes in agricultural practices and the introduction of disease-resistant crop varieties have largely eliminated ergotism in modern times
Correct, but B. Cereus is essentially the most common food poisoning bacteria, depending on what sources you look at.
Not strictly food poisoning, but my wife is extremely allergic to one of the types of seeds commonly put on bread. The plastic packaging virtually eliminates contamination between breads stored adjacent to each other. Since marrying her, I've stopped taking home bread in paper bags or bread lying in the open.
As soon as there is demand, I'm sure they'll start mining. Provided it doesn't leave the planet, everything is recycled on a long enough timescale.
The cheapness of plastic just to speaks to the enormous demand for all the other oil products sold, it's practically a byproduct.
somebody once said oil is too valuable to burn for fuel. the important part are the petrochemicals, but the demand for fuel is so high that's where the money is
What will happen to the price of plastic when demand for oil starts reducing for mobility and heating with the move to electricity energy?
Flying pigs will deliver our food directly from the production point, no more need for packaging.
Not much; I used to think the same thing. But there are many ways to make the same chemicals from bio sources, either directly grown (corn or soy as feedstocks) or more processed, or bioengineered so bacteria convert some bio input to the desired chemicals
Between (a) component that costs tens of cents to mass produce and can be bought off the shelf and is reusable vs (b) component that needs actual experienced electronics engineers working on a single-use design that can not be repurposed later, I think we'd see that (a) might end up being less wasteful.
> can not be repurposed later
whether it can be repurposed is worth little in being wasteful if >99% go to the landfill.
> I think we'd see that (a) might end up being less wasteful.
Monetarily? sure. Environmentally? unlikely
Environmentally, there is very little difference at the landfill if the PCB has an 8 bit microcontroller or a 64 bit ARM chip.
The only environment-friendly solution is to forbid this product to exist in the first place.
Exactly. Why not just sell a reusable vape that can be filled with the extract you want?
> Why not just sell a reusable vape that can be filled with the extract you want?
That's where the vapes started, and they still sell them.
I have a battery holder that's really just some control circuitry and a spot to shove an 18650. On that goes the tank which holds liquid and is refillable. Inside of that goes the "coil" which is the wick and heating element.
Daily I add a bit more fluid. Every 2-4 weeks I replace the coil. Every 1-2 years I replace the battery holder and tank. The 18650s I swap between to power it are 6-8 years old and still going.
(I'd replace the battery holder and tank less frequently, but I just can't find any that will last much longer than that banging around in my pocket and suffering the occasional drop or fall. All-in-all though, I've minimized the waste about as much as I reasonably can without quitting entirely.)
Somewhere in between and closer to what people are buying as "disposable" you can get refillable pods like my wife has. The "base" has a built-in battery and the circuitry. The tank and coil are a single unit. You add fluid and keep refilling until the wick/coil are gummed up, then toss the entire tank and coil... but keep the same battery/electronics.
Really, it's almost the exact same thing as these disposable units just with _very minimal_ changes to make them reusable.
Which is why I think these disposable units are extra heinous. There's just no reason for them to exist at all.
if this is a serious question:
it's because politicians bend to pressure from lobbyists and outcry, such that the very idea that a resuable vape means that children can vape pina colada flavored liquids.
There was a federal push during Trump v1 to only allow iqos devices in any stores. The two vape brands (maybe 3) allowed in general in my state are manufactured by... if you guessed RJR and PMI, you are correct. The big tobacco farmers and cig manufacturers.
Reusable vapes with custom or pre-mixed flavors were attacked hard. I still have a couple liters of 100mg/ml nicotine in my freezer, for making custom flavors at home. I don't even know if you can still order nicotine in that ratio anymore in the US.
It's not so much that 99% go to the landfill, but this product does. Other products that use the same parts might be more reusable.
The point is that, most likely, the controller existed before this vape. Buying an off the shelf part can be cheaper than trying to bring up some custom part, both in cost and possibly in overall resources.
I don't follow the logic.
Because humans are expensive? Or because we can maybe re-use the components if an (expensive) human comes and retrieves the components?
Sorry for being dumb here.
A combination of:
- humans are expensive.
- If you want a custom part, you will need specialized equipment to build that part.
- If you want a custom part, you will maybe need to transport that part all around the world, while the off-the-shelf components might already be available close to your assembly plant.
The USB-C connectors are mostly for charging, and IME it'll take 4-6 full cycle charges until most are out of vape juice and disposable so they're always accessible. The packaging usually is snap-together with no screws so it's a puzzle.
I'm still surprised to see the fancier LCDs used which range from 2x4cm - slim 1.5x3cm (Digiflower, Raz is super popular.) Most LCD vapes which range from $20-25 are starting to fall by the wayside for $13-15 vapes with simple SMD LED displays with color overlays, (Kadobar, Geek Bar, Cookies, North) easy to make 7-segments for battery/juice status. Some are elaborate with wraparound displays that I've mistaken for flexible OLED and are deceptively cheap.
Makes me think of these:
https://duskos.org https://collapseos.org
How do I build a 6502 from just the elements?
You begin by making a pen "from just the elements", then work your way up to there.
In other words, it's a huge challenge, but 6502 is closer, in complexity, to the pen than to the, say, AMD Ryzen.
But the primary idea behind Collapse OS isn't to run from 6502 built from the ground up (although it partly is), but to run from frankenstein cobbled up machines made from scavenged parts.
I wonder how many of preppers has mask images in their archives. Manufacturing primitive integrated circuits theoretically don't require digitally controlled machinery.
If I scavenge any machine today, how likely would I be to find a 6502 vs something more modern? I’d argue that some people might have a NES at home and one could get a 2A03 from it, but in a hypothetical scenario where I need to scavenge some computational power, I’d find an Android phone
You're much more likely to stumble one something more modern, but that modern something is also much less repairable. It's great if it works and if it can run Linux or Dusk OS, but when it can't, you're out of luck.
With a 6502 or other such CPU, the machines you scavenge them from are much more repairable and adaptable. You can use those components like lego blocks. It breaks? either repair it or strip the working parts to use in another frankenstein computer.
I get the idea of making a frankenstein computer, I just disagree that 6502 is THE platform to do it on. Practically, there's no way for me to find it. Other comment mentions ARM, which is a much more interesting proposal to me
ARM is an interesting proposal if you want to order a SBC online and run software on it. Soldering an ARM CPU with low tech tools? That's something else.
Time of a strategic reserve of J-Links?
DuskOS apparently runs on ARM, so one of these vape boards running FORTH would likely feel very roomy indeed.
I have ported zForth to an even weaker chip, the famous 10c risc-v micro ch32v003 (16k flash, 2k ram) so no issue running on this: https://github.com/BogdanTheGeek/zForth
Allow me to brag about romforth (https://github.com/romforth/romforth) which I ported to the "3c" Padauk and can run on really small rom/ram microcontrollers. Caveats: - tested only on an emulator SDCC/ucsim_pdk, not on real hardware - given how small the ram is, there is no user dictionary but new words can be defined and tested using what the Forth folks refer to as "umbilical hosting".
Even for a Forth, 3KB of RAM is rather tight. Dusk OS intentionally de-prioritize compactness and it couldn't run on that amount of RAM. It can get a C compiler loaded in about 100KB of RAM, but 3? not enough to boot.
OK, so we'd play with zForth then, as BogdanTheGeek notes here. That reminds me, I have a Scamp board sitting here on my desk that I really should play with more. https://udamonic.com/what-is-a-scamp.html
"we'd", you mean in a collapse scenario? Forths are, by nature, "collapse-friendly", but one particularity with Collapse OS and Dusk OS is that they are fully self-hosted. This includes the tools necessary to improve upon themselves.
From a quick glance, it looks like BogdanTheGeek's Forth is written in C, which means that it's not self-hosted. If all you have is that disposable vape with this Forth in it, you lack the tools to deploy it on another machine or to improve it in place.
One could also port Collapse OS to ARM. I guess it wouldn't be a very big effort.
Good points! Really, I should start with learning Forth on the devices I have first, before getting to concerned about others. ARM does seem like a useful target though, given that they're basically everywhere these days.
OK. It would be nice though if Collapse OS contained tools to build an AMD Ryzen.
holy crap, what a rabbit hole you sent me down.
The fact that selling such a thing is profitable means that we lack regulations somewhere.
No, it means computing has gotten so %$#@ cheap that it's cheaper to just cobble together cheap parts instead of spending the money to design a purposed device.
That's not mutually exclusive with what I said.
Laws are not here to make money, they are here to decide what kind of society we want. If electronics is too cheap and it creates wastes, I'm of the opinion that we should make it illegal, period.
>The fact that selling such a thing is profitable means that we lack regulations somewhere.
It's the exact opposite. Tobacco is so heavily regulated and taxed that these become profitable. If cigarettes were 3-4$ a pack (which they would be without sin taxes and regulatory overhead), the vape market would come down as well and there's no way these could be profitable. As it is, they retail around $20 and contain the same nicotine as multiple $10 packs of cigarettes.
The regulation was written in time when there were no such devices. Are they "healthier" (less damaging) for the user? If yes, let's tax them lower. Are they less damaging for whole population? Considering the e-waste, I guess not, but it's not up to me to decide. If they aren't, they shouldn't be taxed higher that cigs, if yes, let's change the regulation.
Because they contain so much more nicotine they are way more addicting, way better for the lungs than smoking but still bad for cardiovascular health. Disposables should be illegal for environmental protection reasons, that's a bit unrelated though since these companies can very easily switch to reusable/pod-systems.
We want people to vape rather than smoke tobacco, obviously, it's not a zero-sum issue.
They need to regulate the nicotine content. In Canada its 2% at least. In the US its pretty much 5% juice only.
5% is 50mg/1ml. A cigarette pack has about 25mg. A geek bar has 16ml of juice = 800mg of nicotine = 32 packs of cigarettes.
While that does vaguely gesture at an increased nicotine consumption, it's pretty meaningless without the corresponding consumption rates. My gut suspects the average smoker goes through a pack of cigarettes a lot faster than the typical vaper goes through a rechargeable disposable vape.
Pack a day is considered heavy smoking.
I go through those rechargeable ones in a week. That's pretty common I think for how addictive they are. https://www.reddit.com/r/Vaping/comments/1i9mva3/how_long_do...
Before the disposables were a thing most juices were either 0.3% or 0.6%
This is 100% big tobacco trying to get people hooked
Cigarettes could sell at 3-4$ a pack only because some regulation are in place that enforce the total separation of manufacturing and selling those packs from paying the cost for the societal damages wrt. health, pollution, littering...
There are many possible ways to slice the economical cake.
I'm not sure what your point is here.
1) They don't sell for $3-4 a pack, yet your post seems to imply that the system has failed for cigarettes.
2) For externalities beyond the input cost of a product, the default [natural] condition is for those costs not to be included - one needn't enforce anything. Rather, it requires that someone with power put their thumb on the scale to enforce the inclusion of those costs during a sale[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax
Sorry it was unclear, I was replying specifically to:
> If cigarettes were 3-4$ a pack (which they would be without sin taxes and regulatory overhead),
Trying to show that 3-4$ a pack is not a more "natural" price for cigarettes than the current one, that it is a matter of perspective, and that if one wanted to construct such a natural price all externalities would have to be taken into account.
You can get 10 packs for 20$CAD on reservations in Canada, and that's for decent cigarettes in packaging, the really cheap ones in ziploc bags go even cheaper. 3-4$ a pack is still a decent markup.
> It's the exact opposite. Tobacco is so heavily regulated and taxed that these become profitable.
It's not the opposite at all. Tobacco should disappear just as well.
Juul was very popular and less wasteful (although not perfect of course) as you disposed of the liquid pod rather than the whole device, they were regulated out of existence though. The regulations had loophole/oversight which paved the way for the disposable vape era.
And we have people in the comment section saying we need more regulations.
There are many examples of good and bad regulations, I don't think you can just point at this one and say "see, regulation bad." They were too narrowly focused on cartridge based systems because that's what high school kids were hooked on.
Technically the disposables need FDA approval I think, many just don't have it. Manufacturers, importers, and retailers just don't care. There's a buck to be made and the spice must flow.
I think we need a regulation about trash. To be allowed to sell products containing things like electronic or plastics companies should be forced to collect x amount of this kind of trash.
No no, regulation and government bad, "free market" and "innovation" good. That's the Hacker's credo. Supposedly.
The fact something is profitable (even vices) does not mean it requires regulations, unless the regulation in mind is direct or indirect cap on profit margins?
The missing regulation is some kind of tax or other disincentive against e-waste. I believe the premise of the GP is that such things can only be profitable if we chose to ignore their environmental impact.
I think it's a lack of regulation to prevent negative externalities. Particularly with respect to waste management / product lifecycle.
...and consumption/dispersion/degradation of the finite/rare/precious resources used in the manufacturing process, which we could also factor in, if we wanted to be serious.
E-waste like this exists because it's legal and profitable.
I believe that we as a society don't want e-waste (at least I don't). And when the society does not want something profitable to be done, it sets regulations.
If it wasn't illegal to steal your neighbour's car and sell it, then it would be profitable. But we as a society don't want it to happen.
Are they an egregious form of Ewaste really? (Serious question). Because there’s so much reusable hardware in so many of the other things we throw out (phones, cars, laptops, etc) but we don’t make reasonable efforts to limit that. I’d love if the vape hardware was standardized to a degree for cool reuse projects like this. Donate a bunch of used vapes as hardware platforms for school projects? Like arduinos…but not.
Most of these vapes are reusable as vapes. They just get sold as disposable and the manufacturers don't include a refill mechanism.
I am very strongly pro-vape more generally but disposable ones should absolutely be illegal. They only serve to a) make them more attractive to casual users (instead of people switching from tobacco) and b) generate waste. Zero benefit to society.
There was a time when people could argue "the upfront cost of a proper vape is a problem that could keep people from switching from cigarettes". That's no longer true, there are incredibly cheap and compact refillable vapes now. (Well, there kinda always were, but they used to be crap. No longer).
The solution here isn't reuse it's just to stop production of them completely.
IMO the most egregious part is that all of these vapes come with perfectly good rechargable lithium batteries at a time where lithium is one of the most important resources.
And they all just go into a landfill without ever being recharged once. It really should be criminal.
Guess where that lithium came from in the first place? It's just going back where it came from, in a more processed form, for "storage" until miners get to it in the future.
Yep, it was just some teenage dinosaur's vape in the past. The circle of life!
I have a (fire resistant) bag full of these batteries.
A hammer, a gentle swing, and some clippers are pretty much all you need to get the batteries out of these disposable vapes.
FWIW a ban came into force this summer in the UK. Rare W. Hopefully the rest of the world follows suit in time.
At least in the US many of these no-name disposable vapes have a really high nicotine concentration too (since they're basically illegal why bother with labeling or regulations). So they're much more addictive.
Why are they so cheap? Is this a place where some sort of recovery tax makes sense then?
They're cheap because they're produced in the millions if not billions. At that scale, each individual unit becomes disgustingly cheap. Some factory in China is pumping them out as fast as possible and slapping on the brand name of whoever is buying.
Disposable vapes were banned in the UK. Which in practise has meant that manufacturers have added the cheapest possible charging port which is non-standard so nobody can charge them and no way to open them to refill them.
https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/disposable-vape-ban-loo...
Maybe they should start charging a deposit per vape, and make the manufacturers pay the cost of recycling or proper disposal.
I actually read the article you linked and these are clearly just shopkeepers breaking the law, lying about these being compliant. There is no legal loophole, except if you count a lack of enforcement as a loophole.
This is amazing, it reminds me of a biology article about a new life form that is not quite virus, not quite bacteria, but something that manages to blur the line between them.
Resource extraction eventually fills all niches, for better or for worse.
> "A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard."
> Dick writes of the IoT being a source of vast-artificial-living-systems functioning on collective compute.
Will the Butlerian Jihad find all the vapes?
It's a shame negative externalities like this are basically impossible to include in the up-front price.
I feel like a law saying "don't put electronics in disposable products" would do the job.
Almost every electronic device becomes disposable at some point, some sooner than others. Just make sure you bring them to an e-waste bin when that time comes. E-waste recycling is a profitable business, so there's always one nearby in my experience.
If you have some old Samsung Galaxy Gio from 2011, it'll provide far more value by recycling it back to raw materials than it would if you'd somehow try to keep it usable in 2025.
The problem here is planned obsolescence in a product's design. That is what needs to be made illegal.
> Almost every electronic device becomes disposable at some point
And we're all gonna die, why would we have laws at all?
When we say "disposable vape", it's not to say "it will eventually stop working". It's more to say "you use it, you throw it away".
> E-waste recycling is a profitable
I don't doubt it's profitable, but it's most certainly not a good thing for the planet. Recycling is generally not a solution to waste.
> The problem here is planned obsolescence in a product's design. That is what needs to be made illegal.
Seriously? We're talking about DISPOSABLE VAPES. They are built to last as short a time as possible. At this point I am not sure if you think you disagree with me, are just nitpicking for the fun of it, or something else?
I am not disagreeing with you. I agree that these disposable vapes should be made illegal. What I meant is that "disposing" is a broad term and is not always bad. Many good products eventually become naturally obsolescent, at which point it's often best to responsibly dispose of them.
The actual problem here is how the product is intentionally designed to only be used once, when that's absolutely unnecessary. We both agree on that. That falls within the issue of planned obsolescence, and that's what regulation needs to target.
Right, got it.
Though I don't believe that when someone talks about a "disposable" product, they mean that "this is a product that you will dispose of before you die". Usually "disposable" means that it's meant to have a short lifetime.
A laptop or a smartphone are not "disposable" in that sense, even though we don't keep them for our lifetime.
Would you include RFID tags in packaging? If so, you're law needs more nuance back to the drawing board.
Sure, there is a need to draw a line somewhere. The plastic wrapping is disposable as well, and it's not always a solution to just not have it.
But a disposable vape is very clearly on the side of "should not exist, period".
Drawing the line will be the hardest part of writing a theoretical law banning electronics in disposable products. And the line will probably be obsolete a few weeks after the law takes effect. Which is why the line should be continuously drawn by a regulatory body, which in America are being an endangered species.
Make a list of tolerated disposable electronics.
RFID chips, maybe (and even then, not sure how much they are needed). What else? I don't think that I consume disposable electronics every day...
So they’ll get rebranded as decorative plastic sticks with a bonus temporary vaping feature, and the packaging will say that you must never throw it away, ever.
I really hope you are starting to understand the difficulty in regulating products like this. A lot of people don’t want to do the right thing.
The law is meant to be interpreted. If a judge decides that you are bullshitting in order to sell an illegal product, you get a fine.
All we need is judges who do their job. Which is easier said than done, I'll admit it.
What about Smoke Detectors, since they too are a disposable electronic?
Do I misunderstand what we mean with "disposable vapes"? It's not the first such comment I see.
When we talk about "disposable vapes", we don't talk about something that lasts 10 years, do we?
Or do you think that the very word "disposable" should not exist, because after all, nothing will last longer than the sun?
You throw away your smoke detector? Just replace the battery.
My guy is out here pulling off the whole thing and tossing it in the trash.
Yes, Smoke Alarms should be thrown away. The element that detects smoke has a 10-year maximum life span, which is exactly why most have moved to a non-replaceable battery that forces you to throw it away (for safety).
I'm going to need to see some data to back up that claim. Americium-241 has a half-life of 432.6 years. The detector itself isn't going to degrade in any meaningful way after only 10 years.
Plus, many smoke alarms these days use a photoelectric sensor which don't wear out but are prone to false alarms from dust, etc. Smoke alarms SHOULD be cleaned at least once a year, by blasting them with compressed air. Dust buildup is a very common reason that smoke alarms stop working as well after any number of years. They require regular cleaning, just like everything else in the house.
Non-replaceable battery smoke alarms are popular because they are much more convenient to own. And you should NOT throw them away, the batteries in these contain lithium and must be recycled.
So you're comparing a smoke detector that lasts 10 years to a disposable vape? Do disposable vapes last 10 years?
Modern smoke detectors, at least here in the US, have a 10-year sealed non-replaceable battery.
Interesting. We bought a bunch (5 pack, 6 pack?) from Costco IIRC about 3-5 years ago, and they all take 2 AA batteries, which is great because we've doubled down on Eneloop batteries for everything possible..
every smoke detector i've seen takes a 9volt battery. maybe this is true for commercial units
Most of those smoke detectors are old and already passed their 10-year-lifespan. People keep putting 9-volt batteries in them, but they shouldn't.
If you go look at modern smoke detectors, many-to-most, now have a non-replaceable battery for exactly that reason.
I didn't have to look far to replace my combo CO/Smoke detector or do a ton of hard searching to find one that just took a 9-volt. The first two results on Amazon US for "smoke detector" take 9-volts.
> The first two results on Amazon US for "smoke detector" take 9-volts.
I did the same thing, and the first four results were Kidde and First Alert Smoke Alarms with non-replaceable 10-year lifespan batteries.
It is likely because you recently purchased one, and Amazon has targeted your results based on your purchase history.
thank you for the information, i bought some in 2023 and they all take 9v batteries so i am quite surprised by this
Those exist and are still available but are fairly outdated in the US. The sealed lithium 10-year disposable is the newer standard. And, actually, building codes for last several year requires them to be hardwired so no batteries at all.
The landlord special on older construction (maybe >10 years old, can't remember when the hardwire code went into effect) will usually be the 9v. Because they don't care about you having to get on a ladder to change the battery every year. They get to save $5-10 per smoke detector. Practically any homeowner is going to choose the 10 year option as the batteries don't have to be swapped.
It's a shame negative externalities like this are basically impossible to include in the up-front price.
You mean like add the cost of a MRI to the price of a pack of cigarettes?
What about bottle deposits on cans and bottles?
I do wonder if there would be a workable law where companies are permanently responsible for what they produce, they must always accept back and responsibly recycle/break down to resources what they put out there, and do away with the shifting of responsibility of waste to society? Seems like a terrible engineering challenge but the right thing to do.
That would create a lot of work for corporate lawyers to create shell companies, merge/push-responsibility-onto/unmerge transactions, selling of "waste cleanup credits" by companies who then quickly go bankrupt (after the founders take all the $$ out of the company), etc...
If there's a will, there's a way... You can only sell "waste cleanup credits" to stable companies (exist more than N years, collateral funds in excess of what the waste disposal costs are,...). The problem is political, as usual.
Disposal fees were a thing here in Ontario, the idea being that consumers should pay up-front for the cost of disposal, and therefore expensive-to-dispose things (like things containing batteries) should cost more.
We rewarded the government that brought this plan in by replacing them with Doug Ford, the brother of the infamous late Toronto mayor Rob Ford who was a literal crack-smoking drunk.
I sure as fuck did not vote for Ford, directly or by the local MP proxy. However, I will readily acknowledge that at the time of the election that brought the Progressive Conservative party into power, the Ontario Liberal Party was giving off strong signals that it had essentially given up any attempt at excellence in its execution of public policy, and that it was seemingly bereft of significant insight beyond the then current state of governance.
They were also hindered by the public's perception of their performance in the matters of Ornge and Hydro One.
It seems strange to me to frame the results of that election as being a reward for re-internalizing the waste management costs of consumer products.
I realize it's a small part of a whole, but it's kind of hard to ignore the broad rejection of environmentalism that happened across-the-board in English-speaking Canada. Green Energy Act was hated and cancelled, eco-fees were hated and got cancelled, carbon pricing was hated and got cancelled, bike lanes are hated and got cancelled.
It seems like voters will reject any attempt to fight climate change if there is cost or inconvenience involved.
A lot of EU regulation goes into this direction, but we are still far away from having it for every product.
Hope you don't get caught in Luddic Path's space with your stash of contraband disposable vape
The mismatch between the Ancient Specs of Yore is kind of interesting. The Commodore 64 had 64KB of RAM, but that RAM was attached to an 8-bit, 1MHz CPU. This thing has call it half the RAM of a Commodore 64, but it's attached to a 32-bit 24MHz CPU the 1980s could only dream of. And it's disposable in 2025. Pretty impressive in a weird way.
Its only got 3k of RAM, 24k of flash. Although modern flash is sometimes the same bandwidth as memory was if you go back a bit, although not latency of course.
The old 1980s computers also had no equivalent of flash storage though, the RAM had to store the program being run as well as act as scratch-space.
It's got only 3KB of RAM, less than even the VIC-20.
Somewhat less than the NES, which had 2 KB work RAM and 2 KB VRAM.
Whoops, yes. I stand corrected. Tack another order of magnitude or so on to the mismatch.
The CPU isn't that fantastical for the 1980s. The Archimedes had an 8MHz ARM in 1987. It was expensive though and came with at least 512KB RAM.
P.S. After I wrote that I looked at the Wikipedia page. Which helpfully reminded me that 1987 was 38 years ago :(
Fair enough. I've gotten out of the habit of thinking exponentially about computer performance. Modify my original post to that 1980s 8-bit era of personal computing. I did intend to compare it on the basis of the RAM available, which as is observed in another correction puts this more in the VIC-20 era...
... for those of us old enough to even have a mental distinction between "the VIC-20 era" and the "Commodore 64" era rather than just being a smear of bittyboxes all equally uselessly small....
The 386SX came out in 1985!
I am happy they demonstrated how useful these devices are. Marking these as "disposable" is a kind of insanity. I recovered a few of them "disposed" (i.e. "randomly thrown away into") in an empty flower pot, and took out the LiPo batteries from them -- which are rechargeable, and have charge circuitry (non-trivial for LiPos). That we somehow decided that it's OK to design these to be used only once feels wrong.
This is the opposite of repairability. We specifically made them impossible to reuse and refill. Makes my tinkerer (and eco-friendly) heart very sad.
There are reusable vapes and reputable stores carry only those, but they are generally many times more expensive than disposable vapes, which are favored by smugglers (profit margins) and underage users (price point and potential seizing by parent/teacher/police).
Disposable vapes put young people in contact with career criminals and organized crime, who will be only too happy to oblige even if the customer has no money. The result is young people in debt to criminals, which has the exact same ramifications as getting in drug debt. Those young people can then be coerced to commit other crimes to cover their debts.
My reusable vape cost like 15$. It's basically the same components as a disposable vape, except I can refill a pod and switch the pod if I burn the wick.
Well, lucky you, I guess? Here they are considered tobacco products and taxed as heavily as cigarettes. I think the cheapest models are around $50.
That amount buys 10-200 disposable vapes from China, depending on how much you order at once and whether you care about the quality. Meanwhile, street resale prices are about $20 per vape. Smuggler’s heaven.
The smugglers / bulk sellers do sell to school kids, who then resell to their friends and even online (telegram most probably). Seen so many teenagers walk over as a random car pulls up to exchange vapes for cash. Even seen a big time dealer arriving at a teenager’s house party in a new, expensive car with a trunk full of vapes, accompanied by muscle, talking about how many of each flavor the customer is going to buy.
Maybe things are better on the other side of the big puddle, even if it means the same things are sold quasi-legally.
>"Disposable vapes put young people in contact with career criminals and organized crime, who will be only too happy to oblige even if the customer has no money. The result is young people in debt to criminals, which has the exact same ramifications as getting in drug debt. Those young people can then be coerced to commit other crimes to cover their debts."
This feels like pure fearmongering, and it's not even believable when most people here grew up around cigarettes, dip, or vapes in secondary school throughout the decades, and the dynamic was never anything like what you’re describing. Nobody was getting shaken down for cigarette or vape debts by “organized crime.” It was usually just some older kid or significant other, ex-student, or friend with a hookup who’d buy a pack or device and resell at a small markup. Sometimes it was even just a straight favor.
Trying to paint disposable vapes as a gateway to mafia debt collection just doesn’t square with lived experience in the US. Plenty of us experimented with nicotine products when we were underage - or know someone who did, and while that had its own health and legal issues, coercion into crime to cover “nicotine debts” simply wasn’t part of it lol
--
More people get into organized crime from their local Wal-Mart denying their job application as their only realistic ways to make money from labor, than ever do from nicotine products
Not everyone lives in the US.
what country contradicts my statements? Where in this world is getting spotted a Geek Bar equate to a severe debt that requires crime to pay off? Absurd premise.
Obviously it isn’t about a single vape. A bulk dealer wants to get rid of stock as quickly as possible, so they don’t expect a payment up front. Say it’s a box of 200 vapes. Then, someone steals it from the teenage vape dealer. Now, the teenager is out $4k in income but expected to pay $1k to $2k to the bulk dealer. That kind of debt to organized crime balloons fast; there are no controls on the interest. After a month of non-payment the amount owed may exceed $10k. At that point, the teenager can easily be coerced to commit additional crimes, including but not limited to hard drugs and murder.
I’d like to stress that this is not hyperbole, such things are documented to happen.
What does somebody buying hundreds of vapes to resell and then having them stolen have to do with individual customers, which was the original premise?
Read it again?
Share your source. Insanity.
Just made an account to call you on this ludicrous BS. Share the documentation if you're so sure it's out there!
The conversation was about a single vape, and casual use, in the first place.
And yeah, I bet that's happened before, just like I bet a day-trader who ran on margin has lost all of his savings, house, cars, and wages through garnishment. That doesn't mean it's how 99% of situations, even in trading on margin, goes.
Even as it relates to underage dealers - even the stupid ones, a very few amount of teens buy in bulk - let alone do it only to fail on sales and get coerced into crime for payback. Not to downplay, the old "ATL" story like that is definitely real shit for illicit drug selling. But for vapes/alcohol/sanctioned (but legal and readily-available) substances? C'mon now. The market's there, but the incentives for coercion (due to the commodities being readily-available) are not.
I'd sooner assume that a story like that is a teen that's making a BS "blame the system" excuse for the fact that they actually bought vapes in bulk, squared it away, wanted to make more money than that hustle could offer, and voluntarily graduated to higher crime on their own. Fair play if they pull the excuse off, though - they've got us talking about it.
It was about smuggling and dealing from my parent comment onwards.
For single-persons, yes. If you want to say it was about the macro, if you say so. You seem to be the only one on that page, though.
Anything else you want to answer to in my replying comment?
Everything you said is wrong. Refillable vapes are around the same price as disposables and kids get them from gas station attendants that don't care. What's this about organized crime?
Not everyone lives in the US. In my country, disposable vapes are banned, so everyone selling or buying them is committing a crime.
Even in the US, selling to kids is illegal in most states, so the same issue applies: kid can't buy vape at store, kid goes to adult who is likely to be criminal to get them to buy for them, now kid is vulnerable to exploitation.
Banning vapes is stupid. Its basically just handing a monopoly to organised crime.
There's a pretty amazing video where a guy makes an entire functioning e-bike battery out of disposable vapes that he gathered around a music festival. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcVp9T8f_W4
I can't fathom why disposables are legal. Really believed that the post-boomer generations actually gave a damn about waste.
I like to start doing like this, but as you can see I'm like most people here don't have experience on electrical or electronic equipment
do you have an idea where I can start doing shit like this??? not up to professional of course but as a hobby where I don't need to electrocute myself would be nice
Building an e-bike battery from some random trash is a terrible idea. You won't electrocute yourself, but you are very likely to burn down your house when one of these cells randomly decides to ignite.
There was a bit of discussion about that Frankenstein last year (it was a protest of sorts): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42045621
They’re already illegal in places, eg UK
"One man's trash is another man's treasure."
That we somehow decided that it's OK to design these to be used only once feels wrong.
But clearly they can be reused, so maybe it's better that they be thrown away by the unknowing, giving those who do know a source of cheap (as in free) electronics?
I wouldn’t want to be the lawyer who one day will have to argue how a device with USB C and a rechargeable battery can be classified as “disposable”.
I thought the point of making them like this was that they technically are reusable, so they can sell them (to people who for some reason keep buying them and throwing them away!) in places where disposable vapes are banned.
I'm confused by why anybody would buy one of these when entirely reusable versions exist, but then vaping seems unwise to me in general except as a way to quit tobacco.
Vaping nicotine doesn't seem that bad to me. AFAICT the dangers outside simple addictiveness are moderate lung irritation and cardiovascular effects, but no strong evidence of cancer caused by vaping alone - far better than cigarettes, and still better than an equivalent drinking problem.
Vaping causes inflammation, nicotine suppresses the immune system (which is probably pretty bad news for fighting any other diseases), and nicotine cessation has been linked with an increase in development of autoimmune disorders in the 12-24 month period after quitting.
I had elevated white blood cells counts and I developed an autoimmune condition a few months after quitting vaping. I had good health record leading up to it and no family history of any autoimmune disorders. White blood cells eventually normalized but autoimmune is forever, although it's under control and I'm lucky that it was caught early.
In the final ~4 years of vaping I didn't use any flavorings either, just 70/30 mix of VG/PG and nicotine.
It's not terrible as far as vices go, much less harmful than the alternatives, but it's definitely not as harmless as I thought going in. I wish I hadn't started and went for the ADHD assessment right away instead of subconsciously self-medicating with nicotine.
> linked with an increase in development of autoimmune disorders in the 12-24 month period after quitting
No shit, I had no idea.
That explains a lot. I quit smoking (well, the first time I tried to quit) when I was 19 (2 years smoking). 3 months later I was in the hospital with sclerosing mesenteritis, a rare disorder for an older person but baffling and way out of left-field for a 19 year old with no prior history autoimmune issues. We only got a diagnosis after full exploratory surgery that earned me a six inch incision scar on my stomach.
Don't start smoking, kids.
Word. I quit nicotine and it triggered auto immune response, I got celiac disease. Never touched it ever again and I had to stop eating like a normal person. No more fast food for the rest of my life.
Amazingly, nicotine is one of the few things in tobacco smoke that isn't carcinogenic.
Still far from harmless though.
I don't think adequate studies have taken a look into the long term effects of all the solvents and oils they use aside from the nicotine. Intuitively, this just seems like a terrible idea putting non-water-soluble vapors into your lungs but I am definitely not a doctor.
It's not exactly a wild list. You can make your own mint vape liquid at home by combining 1 part vegetable glycerin with 1 part glycol, dissolving nicotine salt to the desired concentration (most dangerous part due to nicotine's toxicity, suggest getting it pre-dissolved in either one or both of the above), then dissolving menthol in to taste.
Don't get me wrong: it's not good for you, but it's a lot less bad for you than cigarettes, and it's not some great mystery as to what's in it.
This is why to me it’s so damn disappointing to me that vaping is targeted so forcefully by the various scolds in the “regulate everything” camp when smoking isn’t yet eradicated. Things like banning flavor and stuff. They want it to be as unpleasant as tobacco, which reduces the likelihood of people switching from tobacco to vaping, killing many of those smokers as a way to “save” teens from taking up an overall not-very-dangerous habit.
> They want it to be as unpleasant as tobacco
I vaped for around 8 years, about 4 years with typical flavorings and the last 4 years unflavored. IME unflavored vaping really isn't that bad, I accidentally switched to it because I ran out of flavoring one time and after a few days I didn't really miss them anymore so I just stopped using them.
I would compare it to people who drink soda all day, they can't fathom how people can drink "boring" plain water all day and they have a really hard time switching, but people who are used to drinking water find it as refreshing and satisfying as anything.
I think these flavorings cause more harm by luring young people to start vaping than they help smokers by luring them away from cigarettes. In an ideal world adults would be allowed to vape whatever they want, and teens wouldn't be able to get their hands on vapes in any capacity, but clearly that's not working so I think that flavor bans are a decent compromise.
I don't buy the argument that flavor bans will make teens go back to smoking. Cigarettes taste awful, they make you smell terrible, they irritate your lungs far more, they're far more expensive. If I was a teen I would still pick up unflavored vaping over cigarette smoking any time, but I'd be less likely to get into vaping without the flavorings.
A counterpoint:
> A third of UK teenagers who vape will go on to start smoking tobacco, research shows, meaning they are as likely to smoke as their peers were in the 1970s.
> The findings suggest that e-cigarettes are increasingly acting as a “gateway” to nicotine cigarettes for children, undermining falling rates of teen smoking over the past 50 years.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jul/29/third-of-uk-...
As an adult with a vaping habit, I can see how that happens. If you're a kid, and thus have unstable access to nicotine vapes (because they're illegal for you to buy), you'll be highly motivated to get your nicotine fix from something if your source of vape liquid dries up. Since cigarettes are more common, the result is a kid being likely to smoke sometimes.
Same thing happens to me (albeit far, far less frequently) when I'm out at the bars with my friends until 2am when I discover I'm out of juice. Since vape shops tend to keep normal retail hours, I'm limited on getting my fix from whatever the 7/11 is selling. If that's Marlboro reds, I'm probably going to smoke a cigarette or two.
Key difference between it being a "gateway drug" and not is the fact that I'll end up throwing away that pack the next day when I can refill my vape. Because smoking sucks in comparison. Not only on health grounds (not a huge concern for most nicotine addicts), but on basic grounds like "making you smell like shit", "hurting your throat", "tasting bad", and "not having the oppurtunity to be used nearly as frequently".
Maybe I'm just an old geeser but when I went back to grad school I was absolutely shocked at how many people vaped, and it seemed to have been because they started smoking flavored vapes. People would go to a party, either in high school or college, and the party would be permeated by some sweet smell. Curious kids/people would investigate, try vaping, and eventually get their own, becoming addicted.
As far as I can tell, banning flavored vapes has had a significant impact on reducing vaping/smoking new users, which is the ultimate goal. People who are currently addicted should primarily be motivated to quit, not find better tasting alternatives
There are numerous other options for supporting smoking cessation that do not risk lung injury.
Counter-point: For someone who's used to smoking or vaping, the craving to "take a puff" can be a very strong, maybe stronger than the chemical dependence on nicotine itself.
I noticed that in myself when I was trying to quit, vaping nicotine-free liquids helped my cravings more than nicotine itself. It didn't help the physical withdrawal symptoms but it mysteriously stopped the cravings for a while.
Sure, and removing one appealing option that many people like still means some people will keep smoking who would have quit.
The main issue with vapes. Especially disposable ones, is the amount of metal in them. Lead, nickle, chromium are among them are are all carcinogens
Vapes are practically unregulated with how many sre being imported from overseas. Health impacts have barely been studied yet.
i have owned lots. they taste better than most permanent vapes. ive tried the whole buy all the best components and perfect juices etc with various tanks of different flavours. disposables just work and taste good, no leaks. they also have a logical end point like a pack of cigarettes. Its nice to switch flavour more frequently, and the packet/vape body colours pressed deep monkey brain buttons for fruit etc
Yeah, the sweetener they put in the disposables is like crack. If a liquid could replicate it then the switch to reusable would be a no brainer, but I never found one. Alas I switched to nicotine gum and haven’t looked back.
50mg/ml disposable vape liquid tasting better than the freebase stuff is a crazy take. I haven't met a single person who was there before the modern disposable trash that doesn't think it's markedly worse. It tastes like gas station vape juice circa 2012.
Good reusable systems have been around for 10 years now. Disposables sell well because people like to think that they can quit whenever they want without having to abandon an investment (never mind that the investment in a refillable system is literally cheaper than a single disposable vape in many cases).
gas station vape juice circa 2012 seems like a touch exaggerated. ive extensively researched making my permanent vape setup taste as good, and its down to the amount and type of sweetener used which doesnt seem to be available.
ive even bought the brand of liquid owned by the disposable company with the same branding. it's just not quite there.
you also have to accept the market for them, according to what you have said above shouldnt exist, but it does
Looking back, the Juul product seems preferable to the current situation
I did the math and Juul was 47x more expensive than the liquids (this is in Canada). Then I switched to the juice vapes, and finally to kick the juice vaping I picked up pipe tobacco. Pipe tobacco is way cheaper than cigs nevermind vapes, the highest quality, and tastes incredibly good (also, you can also get that "first cigarette headrush" every time if you like by inhaling, works every time).
I used to love the smell of my Grandfather's pipe smoke. I still enjoy the occasional 2nd-hand smell of a rollup. Is pipe tobacco different to rollies?
Substantially. It is way more coarse, usually much more moist as well. Tends to be more “pure” tobacco with less additives, though I’m sure that’s not universal. I know somebody who does not smoke but buys it to keep in cabinets and various drawers because they love the smell. I must admit I am partial to the smell as well.
This is an excellent idea, ty.
What the other guy said. Do yourself a favour and pickup some Mr. B's Crème brûlée just to smell it. It's like the best thing I've ever smelt even outside of tobacco. It's not an acquired taste where if you say something smells amazing it's implied that it's within the range of something objectively nasty.
I meant in terms of e waste mostly, disposable pod vs disposable device
Because reusable versions are a hassle. Cleaning, Charging, Changing Batteries, Changing liquid, etc. Whereas with reusable, well, you just puff and worry about nothing. Which is why people vape in the first place :)
But, then where would you host your website?
Used milk carton. It probably has more TFlops than Commodore 64.
In Australia you need a prescription to get nicotine liquid but every convenience store in any big city sells disposables illegally for cheap.
Just like how places with bag bans often just end up with thicker plastic bags that can be sold for ten cents and claimed as “reusable.
They are reusable, which many people take advantage of. And it has dramatically reduced the number of tumbleweed bags clogging up nature.
Reasonable people already reused single-use bags. Trashcan liners, dog walk bags, cat scoop bags, etc.
Having recently been reminded that it used to be common to see eviscerated VHS tapes by roads, I've been reminded that we'll always have people who litter.
I’m not sure what your point is: because one type of litter is reduced, it doesn’t matter because people still litter in other ways?
In every place where plastic bags are banned, there’s a dramatic and obvious reduction in the amount of them clogging up trees, roads, fields, waterways, etc. If people need them for other purposes, they can buy them, while everyone else who doesn’t need them, doesn’t.
Yep, every so often I remember staring out the window on the highway in the car as a kid and seeing single use bags snagged on fences or trees pretty much anywhere inaccessible or not routinely cleaned.
I also catch it on B roll footage in movies or shows from the 90s/2000s a lot. It’s a specific type of visual blight I rarely ever see after those ultra flimsy single use bags that could be carried dozens of miles on a gentle breeze were eliminated.
(This children's book was written basically at the tail end of the era where seeing a bag flying could conjure the imagination)
https://www.amazon.com/Bag-Wind-Ted-Kooser/dp/0763630012#ave...
The bag bans in general are good - and heavy bags aren’t that bad, especially since they don’t blow as far or as easily.
Many single use bags come with holes in them or develop them after a single trip hauling boxes with sharp corners home. Making the plastic a little thicker makes it last many times longer.
The majority of people reuse those bags, they're pretty great actually. Most people I know have slightly more expensive bags made out of fabric though.
Not here. Standing in line at stores like target that have them I see maybe 1/20 people checking out in front of me bring in reused disposable sacks, while 15/20 leave with new ones. Certainly not enough reuse to justify the extra thickness.
I do really enjoy the thickness, and they do displace the cheaper ones in the tube of spares at home, but they’re just bags at the end of the day.
We get most of our groceries through Drive Up services, where you place an order the day before and they bring the groceries to your car. Through a combination of a new disability, and a new baby in our family, the convenience is well worth the price (free).
But now every week we have more and more reusable bags that we can't find any use for, so we recycle a bunch each quarter. (And even that is questionable, when they are covered in impossible-to-remove stickers.)
You've misunderstood the assignment if you don't reuse those, they are perfectly fine for that and will last a long time. Just have one in your bag or car. I've even reused paper bags for more than half a year since the ban.
They make perfect office/bathroom trash can liners
They do, but they still don’t make it back to the stores enough, and nobody has 16 wastebaskets to line every week. Also the old ones were just as suitable for wastebasket duty.
The bag laws have done nothing but increase the consumption of plastic, since stores still go through nearly as many, but they’re 5x thicker now.
> The current data provided by the main retailers for the reporting year 2024 to 2025 shows a reduction of almost 98% on the annual number of single-use carrier bags sold since the charge was introduced. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/carrier-bag-charg...
5x thicker is still a net win.
And it was less about reducing plastic consumption and more about reducing plastic pollution. 1000 tonnes of plastic in a landfill and incinerators (because the heavier bags are more likely to be reused even just as bin bags) is better than 200 tonnes blowing around and decaying into environmental microplastics.
In terms of total plastic consumption, 8 billion plastic bags (what the UK used before the charge) is maybe between 20000 and 40000 tonnes depending on thickness. Which is pretty minor on the scale of plastic usage considering how much plastic crap and packaging was and still is used.
The only time I even get one of those things is if I forget my regular bag or I buy too much stuff to fit. That happens like once a month. Why are you going into the store empty handed and coming out with 16 plastic bags?
Not everyone is you. 16 is mild hyperbole, but I'm not even speaking normatively on what people should do. I'm speaking about what people do do. I'll stipulate that everyone including me should always keep at least 10 bags in my car so that I can do about 2 typical shopping trips even if I forget to put them back in the car. And we should always remember to carry them in. But that isn't happening with the current hilariously poor incentives in place (50 measly cents to buy 5 bags and no bag deposit either.)
I predict that if you spend 10 minutes observing the checkouts in your supermarket you'll see exactly what I see: At least 75% of people buying new plastic bags for the transaction, and zero people depositing bags into the special bag recycling bin at the store - which in the US is basically the only place this type of plastic is even accepted for recycling.
And again, these bags appear to be 3-5x as thick as the old bags, so the bag law is a huge win for Big Plastic who sells more plastic than they used to, and it mostly goes into the landfill.
The solutions:
• Admit this is a failed policy
• Everyone everywhere stops being imperfect, forgetful and lazy -- 100% of the time.
California is still hoping for the latter to pan out!
Why are you buying 16 bags worth of stuff every week? That seems like the bigger problem.
If you have a family and a grocery store in walking distance you can do it easily; I would hit 16 if I forgot my shopping bag - which I do on occasion.
Some have replaceable pods / tanks, but most have no user serviceable parts whatsoever.
One the liquid is low enough, the coil will burn a bit, and the whole thing should be disposed of.
One shop near me would take used ones and send them off to be properly taken apart and what not, but most people just toss them I suspect.
The coil is part of the pod and therefore user-replaceable. The point of a pod system is to keep the coil and liquid in a self-contained system, which practically eliminates the risk of liquid leaks. All of these quasi-disposable vapes with replaceable pods and a charging port can be re-used hundreds of times.
I don't know why people dispose of the whole thing rather than just changing the pod, but at least it's a boon for electronics hobbyists.
Each morning, I walk 5K. I start off in the dark. By midwinter, the whole walk is in the dark.
I am constantly walking past disposable vapes in the street, with their LEDs still shining.
Growing up, smoking was quite common. A lot can change in 20-30 years, so I'm cautiously optimistic that maybe vaping will eventually become as socially unacceptable as smoking.
Some of the new ones have the coil and vape juice in a disposable section while the battery and charge circuitry are reused.
If you're in the EU/UK the WEEE directive means anywhere selling them should take them back like-for-like to be directed into the correct waste stream. (they get paid some of the deposit on them to do so)
I would be more fine with disposable vapes like this if almost all of them were recovered somehow, for the amount it subsidises production of Li-ion batteries.
That's the theory. I practice, even in famously recycling-obsessed Germany, it's impossible to return electronics in places that are required to accept them, even two years after that law passed. The staff is really confused when you try.
Theoretically a high enough deposit could probably “fix the problem.” Like, if the empty was worth a $25 deposit most people would 100% take them back to the store. It would be annoying for people to have the high deposit, but it’s really a one-time expense.
On the other hand at least in the US, a deposit of a buck or two wouldn’t do much. California has that for cans and bottles, yet only maybe 10% of people turn them in. Most end up in curbside recycling (which doesn’t refund) or the garbage, indicating people don’t care about getting their nickel or dime back.
Where I live in CA, many end up going to some stranger who rifles through everybody's curbside recycling bin before trash day. It's sad that times are hard, and this is the side job we've accidentally invented.
No, it’s there because the battery can’t hold enough charge for the ratio of vape liquid they put in it. So you get 2-3 full charges and it runs out of liquid.
Disposable vapes are an abomination that somehow society has normalised.
Society tends to normalize things that have ad budgets.
Do vapes have ad budgets? All I see are anti-vape ads?
They represent the most viable pathway for big tobacco to exit regular cigarettes, which are in decline or at least struggling. AND vapes have huge traction with younger people. It's basically The Thing that big tobacco needs to go all in on if they want to keep selling carcinogenic air to people for the next 50 years
Yes, like all tobacco products. These days a lot of marketing is targeted and subtle, especially for an industry used to dealing with advertising restrictions.
https://tobaccoatlas.org/challenges/marketing/
Ad budgets and convenience/"cool factor." Similar to cigarettes, people think they look cool when doing it and/or do so to fit in with groups that do.
Not to mention the EXTREME damage it can do to a person's lungs, and do this damage very quickly.
Probably not, unless there are very specific substances in the liquid being vaped.
There are two known culprits: diacetyl is/was used in some flavorings for its buttery taste, and liquid Vitamin E oil was used in clandestinely produced THC vape cartridges (which are really not relevant for the topic at hand). Both of those have largely disappeared from the market.
Sure, some cheap components can in theory leach heavy metals into liquids. The amounts are insignificant compared to what you will be breathing in just by walking on city streets, even outside rush hour.
And at least vapes don’t contain polonium-210 like cigarettes do.
Long live hacking! This is what Hacker News is all about. Great article and fun project!
The current state of technology is ... weird. From AI doing our art instead of our work, to hosting a website on an eCigarette. "Weird" is the only word I can think of at this moment.
This reminds me of when I was a kid, taking apart toys just to keep the tiny motors and circuit boards like treasures. Now as an adult, seeing someone pull a full working system out of a disposable vape to run a website feels like the same kind of magic. Maybe this is what romance looks like in the tech world.
We need to reduce microplastics.
Let's put microcontrollers into disposable vapes.
I don't know if I'm sad or happy.
The micro in this thing is a WQFN-16 (W = very very thin, thinner than V for very) with 3x3x0.75mm body. That's around a fiftieth of a gram of plastic.
I think the bigger SOIC chip is probably the battery charge IC. And then maybe a gram or two of PCB epoxy. And the plastic in the battery pouch and membranes which you need anyway.
In terms of plastics waste volume, the casing and tank is probably nearly all of the content. So the problem is a disposable vape bring a thing at all, not really the microcontroller in there.
It feels mad and somehow wasteful that you can get a CPU at that price point, but the die itself is a tiny sliver of silicon. You can even embed an (even tinier) and weedier application-specific) IC in a paper metro ticket. Compute is just so ridiculously cheap that you can have a hundred of functional ICs for the cost of a single largish cup of hot bean water.
The mfg/mining process for the chips is probably equally bad.
All for a device to help you develop health problems.
There's more silicon in the battery charge controller probably (bigger transistors). The MCU is just a speck. Ironically making these disposable vapes "reusable" causes more e-waste as now they need a connector and charge controller and a bigger PCB.
You could say that for a lot of devices.
It is indisputable that anyone switching cigarette smoking to vaping is making a healthier choice.
>healthier choice
No just no.
https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-lifestyle/qu...
You’re seriously considering that inhaling vapor of nicotinized smoke machine liquid is equally bad as inhaling 700-1200 Celsius combustion products containing microparticles and radioactive isotopes?
I get that people want to scare kids, but that level of hyperbole is way overkill and has the opposite psychological effect on those who can think for themselves.
Could one say that the author found the ultimate computing platform for running vaporware?
This was my first time working with perl and I have to say, it’s quite well suited to this kind of task.
Nice to see Perl get positive press. Fun project, Bogdan!
https://github.com/BogdanTheGeek/semihost-ip/blob/main/lib/u...
I’m not vaping mom, It’s my webserver.
I always forget about the idea that IPv6 was intended to allow literally everything to have an address. The mouse, keyboard, display, etc. Seems like a bad idea now, but back then it was considered as part of the overall plan for the nearly infinite space. Maybe the joke is still missing a punchline. We've had this generic device interface for decades but decided on proprietary and arbitrary standards of device communication to make our lives easier in the short-term.
I am SHOCKED everytime I am reminded those Disposable Vapes exist.
My friend, that is a Portable Computer you are holding in Your Hands, and You are THROWING IT AWAY after ONE SINGLE USE?
Insane.
At least the fact that we got to this point in the first place is certainly an achievement for humanity as a whole?
Meta comment: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a HN thread with this ratio of upvotes to comments (8 vs. 251)
Disposable vapes are an extreme failure of legislation, but this is a cool hack nonetheless!
Regarding the meta comment, it's due to comments being moved from a 4 hour older post into this brand new post by the mods (a bit strange).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45249287#45252845
Ah, that makes more sense, thanks!
By law, neither electronics nor batteries can be disposed of with generic waste. This is the case in the EU, at least. So how are people then disposing these devices?
Disclaimer: I do know the answer, but I'd rather pretend that people actually follow the law.
The vape comes with a miniature laser-engraved WEEE crossed-out trash can symbol so everything is fine.
Getting a 503 error now upon request to the vape hosted blog. Safe to say that it got smoked by the hacker news traffic volume!
"pacifiers for adults" is probably the best description for a vape that I have ever read.
I see that as of the time of this comment, he hasn't run Doom on it.
Yet?
3kb of RAM and 24kb of flash is a bit tight for Doom unfortunately. It has been ported to another Cortex-M0+ microcontroller, the RP2040, but that has 264kb of RAM plus megabytes of flash and the game still barely fits.
3kb of RAM and 24kb of flash is a bit tight for Doom
You can play Doom on an Atari 2600: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/323152-doom-the-2600-demak...
Just need to outboard a little extra RAM.
So you’d just need about 100 vapes. If you have a friend who uses them, should not take long to collect.
A Beowulf cluster of vapes...
I see that as of the time of this comment, he hasn't run Doom on it.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of them…
I was just thinking about that slashdot meme the other day. Like Beowulf clusters were the dream! Imagine one! I wanted one! Everybody did!
And now you can spin that shit up for pennies an hour and then throw it all away when you are done.
Who would have seen that coming back in, what, 1998…
So the EEs are right. Electrical circuits run on magic smoke.
Or would it be the other way around?
This is why I come to HackerNews. This made my day.
I used to see disposable vapes dumped on the street until they were banned (thankfully). All those wasted batteries and microcontrollers is really wasteful.
This is really impressive. I laughed when I got 503 Unavailable on the hosted URL. I guess we're all hugging that little vape CPU a little too hard. :)
That's gotta be between 75 and 90% less damaging to humanity than the designed use of a disposable vape. Well done, Bogdan!
I'm reminded of the project Tom7 put together a few years back where he used the surplus components inside a digital COVID kit as spare memory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio
> This may not come as a surprise, but Linux (and with some tweaking even macOS) supports SLIP.
Anyone have any experience with SLIP for macOS? Curious if the author was actually able to make that work, I’ve been looking into something similar the past few weeks with no luck.
so I had to throw nginx in front of it so my little router wouldn't explode, but I hope some people will get to experience the relaxing loading experience live.
The HN way is to colocate a cluster of these and put them behind a F5
Took a few attempts (over a few hours) to get the vape hosted version to load... but it just worked and I felt soooo happy!
I wonder if you could use one vape as a load balancer, then have a few of them serving the content?
So a question maybe someone can clue me in on here: while the specs on that MCU seem imminently reasonable to me (especially compared to some of the PIC12F and similar I've used in the past) the thing that feels odd is the high clock speed ARM core. Is it really that cheap and easy to drop an M0 core or ip block into an MCU? Why not more RAM and a simpler/slower core? The M0 feels grossly overkill.
Missed opportunity to put a 503:Vape Unavailable http error.
I never thought I'd see someone turn a vape into a web server. Totally absurd but also kind of brilliant. I probably won’t remember the technical details, but that ‘why not just try it’ attitude is seriously contagious.
Want to fit a web server into a speck of dust? Check out smews ( https://github.com/2xs/smews ) it runs with just 8k of flash and 512 bytes of RAM, supports HTTP 1.1 over TCP/IP, SLIP or others, with both static and dynamic content (GET and POST) The code is 18 years old and hasn’t moved in 10, A sandbox for budding pentesters ;)
You think a Cortex-M0+ in a disposable vape is wasteful, wait until you see the ones with colour touchscreens and Bluetooth radios. It's probably only a matter of time before they start running Android on them.
What's insane is how cheap all those components are. A quadcore processor with ram and memory, WiFi and Bluetooth for pennies at wholesale.
The latest and fastest GPUs might be a marvel of technology, but so is the tech that let's us make and esp32 for almost nothing
I guess at this point it’s safe to assume humanity won’t regress to a time before computers anymore.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of... wait probably not
yeah, in 1992 we ran Doom on a 386DX 20Mhz and 320x200 VGA mode :-D
(and it was slooooow and ugly!)
how long til they have GPT-5 level LLMs?
This is cool, but, man, I felt like such a pathetic excuse for a human being when, brutally craving nicotine, with my vape empty of the fruit-flavoured juice that I am literally addicted to like the stupid pathetic baby that I am, and stuck with the cravings because all the shops are closed until morning, and so, in need of a distraction, I opened Hacker News. FFS.
Sometimes the only option is to laugh at your own expense! Clearly this is a sign. I should buy more juice next time. And maybe start smoking more actual cigs.
Quitting smoking was the best decision I made and I wish I did it earlier. If you feel ready Allen Carr's book worked for me. I wasted so much time smoking.
Thanks man, appreciate it, and kudos for stopping.
I might quit, I guess, when my fiancee has to for pregnancy, should it eventually stop being funny to tell her how wonderful each individual cigarette I smoke is. But I really, really love smoking - more than any of my other hobbies, wholesome or otherwise.
I'm sure that'll change, and I'll look that book up if and when it does. Thanks again.
Having an addiction doesn't make anyone "a pathetic excuse for a human being"
I agree wholeheartedly.
I've been (I am?) addicted to many substances, from fruit-flavoured nicotine juice through to heroin.
I find self-deprecating humour useful, personally. It helps me not wallow, to take the cravings less seriously. I of course wouldn't say the same about anyone who isn't me.
Because, as you say, someone who has an addiction isn't lesser than anyone else. It's a state of being that requires an awful lot of strength.
That said, having to use that strength on 'mango e-liquid' is, I think, funny in an absurdist way. We live in strange times!
Good. Just wanted to make sure you weren't being too hard on yourself.
No - that's what the drugs are for. Only joking (for real).
I appreciate that, thank you. And I can totally see how my comment above might read patronising to people dealing with shit that is functionally much, much worse than the situation I described, so I appreciated the opportunity to right that, also.
We are truly living in the precursor to some cyberpunk fever dream with this. Give it a few years and we’ll be smokin’ grandma & grandpa’s uploads out of vapes.
I wonder how much cost would be added if they included a small usb storage drive in those things. You could incentivize non-disposal because people would have a million of those things.
It’s really hard to quite vaping btw.
Add a GPS and a few propellers to vapes so they can fly themselves directly into the nearest river, lake or (as a last resort) ocean once they're empty.
I know you're joking, but it seems like a great option for IEDs. Cheap, hard to trade (might even come with a patsy's DNA preinstalled)
Why wait until they're empty, let he fish vape I say!
Self-smoked salmon
If the eels get car batteries, the fish can have a little vape, as a treat.
It seems like depending on the dose, Zebra Fish rather like it.[1]
[1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027858461...
> It’s really hard to quite vaping btw.
They put addictive stuff in vapes, because of course they do.
The Addictive Stuff™ is literally the core feature of the item. Your comment makes it sound like the producers are nefariously and covertly adding nicotine to a product which normally would not have any? It's like saying "These scoundrel breweries! They're making beer that gets you drunk!"
I mean disposable vapes are just complete idiocy to begin with.
Vapes with pods are less expensive in the long run and offer a vastly superior vaping experience. You can get liquid for dirt cheap. If you smoke heavily, you might offset the initial investment in a week or two.
Disposable vapes offer zero advantages. They are only good if you want to "just try" it once or that is what you are going to tell yourself in your career of producing e-waste.
What they offer is ubiquity and the turnkey nature. You can walk into any nearby smoke shop, get one and use it immediately. You don't have to carry around a bottle of liquid and extra coils and paper towels/napkins for the inevitable leak.
I stopped vaping a little while ago but when I did vape, there was no clear standard of pod systems. You sure could walk into a nearby smoke shop but it was unlikely that you'd find your ideal pod/coil/liquid.
It's hard to take back the convenience people have gotten used to. I think one idea could be that disposable vapes become recyclable vapes. They should cost $15 more and buyers should get back $10 when they return it for recycling. This is nicotine we're talking about so the buyer is always coming back anyway.
While I do believe that disposable vapes should be banned even if they happen to be more convenient, I really don't see it. When I vaped myself I liked having a re-usable vape so much more than the disposable crap.
With the disposable it would always be a gamble how long they would last. I don't get how people manage. Do they buy multiples at once and carry them around?
It was so much more convenient to carry that small bottle of liquid with me and have the peace of mind that I wouldn't run out of juice for the night. Never had issues with spilled liquid.
Not having a standard for pods sucks but you don't need to buy them that often. I just ordered them online anyway.
Of course it might be a bit of a cultural difference as well. Most of my smoker friends roll their own cigarettes which is way more inconvenient.
I wonder when an Android phone will be released that includes a vape attachment.
Don't think Apple would go there, but who knows....
Hey can you print this paper off my vape bro? I need to turn it in to my next class.
True vaperware
living that cloud life
Nice. But ...
> Later modems used PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol)
PPP a (c)slip are not used by modems but by the computers whose serials are up and running. Even without modems.
very impressive, I wonder if it would run Collapse OS (https://collapseos.org/)
I respect the point about not wanting to send the manufacturer any business, but I would love to know the brand so I'd know which ones to rescue if given the chance.
I am probably stupid so bear with me. I don't get the part about not naming brands if you are certain they won't ever sponsor you. I feel like it just hurts the value of the article with nothing gained
It's not about sponsorships and integrity, it's about preventing the pipeline "Person reads article -> Sees this brand of vape has micocontrollers -> Buys this brand of vape".
(If I understood the author correctly, y'know, not to speak for them)
Ok, but what's bad about this?
Contributing to people buying stuff that's bad for them, and giving money to an industry that profits off it, presumably? Again, I'm just assuming the author's position(which, for the record I do not share) here.
may I ask what's your personal stance on this?
Possibly greater e-waste than there would otherwise have been.
I doubt it. He doesn't want to mention a SPECIFIC brand. But is fine with mentioning vaping. Or maybe you meant the chip?
don't worry about speaking for the author. I want to gather as many explanations of this as possible because none of them seem to be consistent and make much sense. I feel like people do this because others do it too without much questioning.
With your example, why would the author care whether some random person buys the vape he mentioned in his article? I don't see the point
This is why I go to hackernews every day <3
I bought a few hundred Puyas for my lab as stock for projects. They are quite capable and very cheap uCs to have around.
Apparently they're cheap because they're a flash memory company that bolts a little CPU onto their own flash, rather than a CPU company having to then buy the more expensive flash with a markup.
It would be nice to pool ideeas for what they could be recycled into. Imagine the amount of automatic cat feeders the world could build with these.
I've actually been trying to look into something similar? I have a pile of old vapes from friends/family I want to re-purpose, but don't really know where to start.
I don't understand the hardware setup. There is a usb-c port and they talk about usb serial devices which could be a usb to serial port, but what is after that? There are no pictures of it connected.
My best guess is that only the power pins of that usb port is connected. So they're going over a debug port for io.
Someone in a different forum said it was a usb to serial port then on a pc a network port was forwarded to the serial port, but it is very unclear in the article.
Makes me start thinking of cool use cases like dropping pineapples all over the place or those GeoCaching things
Reality catching up with satire: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lE4UXdJSJM4&t=170s
Has anyone done the joke about "next big cloud platform" yet?
This is quite amazing. Dumb question: is there a way to run it in QEMU?
Maybe, I'm not sure how you would connect a debugger to qemu, and you would have to emulate the ram and flash, but other than that is pretty standard arm cortex m0. The code is pretty generic too.
Makes sense, thank you. Congrats on the extremely cool project.
But the essential resources for website hosting are public IP address and link bandwidth. Not a tiny computer.
Luckily, IP addresses (in particular for websites) and bandwidth can be shared with many devices.
A good demo for a computer would be something that needs computing, like running DOOM.
As of this moment, this article has 420 comments which seems fitting.
I guess until now, mine may be the 421st.
Can someone please make a zyn tin container for these?
I found of these that had a built-in retro game console with screen. Like, the kind of little game that a small child would be interested in. So frustrating.
At this point, is there any device left we could not make a web server yet?
Wow, it even survived the HN hug of death.
It's on life support, only about 5% of the request get though, most html only. I've been babying it all day :)
Just smoke a bit more and build a vape load balancer that just randomly forwards to a small vape cluster.
Seriously nice project!
These chips are more powerful than some µC I used for medical applications just a few years ago...
No mas.
Your GitHub link in the doc gives me a 404. Otherwise, good stuff!
Thank you, it's fixed now.
Hei ; Preact would be deff appropriate in that scenario ; it's a clone of react that is meant to be small !
Very inspiring work btw !
What were you doing to get traffic from the open Internet to your webserver at home? I always felt that was a risky proposition, but I might just be stupid.
I've hosted at home for years and if you have it properly setup it's not any more risky than using a VPS. I have 443 open on my router and basically all web traffic is routed to a container on my server. The container is on an isolated vlan and basically runs nginx as a ssl reverse proxy.
The actual web services behind the proxy run in their own containers and with proper isolation and firewall rules the effects of a security compromise are limited. At most an attacker will be able to take over the containers with an exploit (and they could do that with a VPS as well) but they won't be able to access the rest of the network or my secure internal systems.
If I was this guy and wanted to let people connect directly to my vapeserver I would simply host it on another vlan and port forward the HTTP connection. Even if someone manages to take over such an obscure system they're not going to be able to do much.
Open a port or if their router supports it, assign their device to a DMZ.
Why do you think it’s risky? Maybe we can talk about ways of securing it.
Like any server, it’s as safe as the server software (and its configuration).
> What were you doing to get traffic from the open Internet to your webserver at home? I always felt that was a risky proposition,
How times change.
Once nearly every self respecting IT pro ran servers from there home network. The modern drive to outsource and consolidate the interweb to a handful of big players I find rather odd; perhaps even counterproductive in the long run.
Done it since before I properly knew what I was doing. Haven't had issues. Even though n=1, also now that I'm actually working in IT security, I don't think the risk was ever much bigger than what I could oversee
The main thing is that, if someone gets onto the server system, then they're in my network and they can do attacks on other devices in that LAN (guest wifis are a nice way to isolate that nowadays; that didn't exist back when I started). Same as when I take my laptop to school for example, then others can reach it. I've had issues with others in school doing attacks because the internet was unencrypted http back then (client-side hashing in JavaScript limited the impact though), but not from anyone who tried to hack into the server. Only automated scans for outdated Wordpress, setup files for Phpmyadmin, ssh password guessing... the things they simply try blindly on every IP address. If any of this is successful, you're most likely going to be turned into a spam-sending server or a DDoS zombie; not something with lasting impact once you discover the issue and remove the malware
Most attackers don't do targeted attacks on your system or network unless you're a commercial entity that presumably can pay a nice ransom, or are a high-profile individual. Attackers aiming for consumers send phishing emails and create phishing advertisements, look for standard password vaults if you run their malware, try using stolen credentials on Steam and hope you've got a payment method stored... the usual old things. Having a server doesn't make any of those attacks easier, and besides, self hosting is very uncommon. Even if you and I had a similar enough setup at home with a straightforward path to exploitation, it's a few thousand people that self-host in a country with millions of people. It's not worth developing attacks for
VPS with public ipv4, connected to home network over Tailscale and forward the traffic with socat. You'd probably be fine opening a port directly but a small VPS is free most places so might as well make the most of it.
Could you elaborate more on the "a small VPS is free"? Except Oracle's free tier offer, I am not aware of others; I'd appreciate it if you could point me in the right direction.
For this I used GCP free tier -- not sure why everyone acts like Oracle are the only free tier around when GCP and AWS offer always-free tiers too. It's just runing socat to forward to the vape over tailscale. Is there something I'm missing?
GCP outbound data is limited to 1GB/mo and I believe by default it doesn't have any cap, it will just charge for additional traffic with the credit card you are required to enter in order to get a free tier account. So I would be careful publishing anything with it.
I'm not sure where to go for the free VPS, other than Oracle Cloud, as you mention, but a Cloudflare tunnel will get traffic into your LAN even behind CGNAT or other nonsense.
You can put the public facing stuff on a separate VLAN and have firewall rules that don’t give the VLAN access to LAN stuff. I only know how to do this with IPv4 though, IPv6 confuses me and I’m scared to get it wrong so I disabled it.
People might hack your toaster and burn your house down? Smart ovens? Smart microwaves? Smart fires?
Any lucky ones? I got only 504-s.
Appcolypse plan: Ammo? Canned food? Fresh water? No.
1,200 geek bars in a faraday cage.
How does the device compare to the computer we used to put a man on the moon?
Running at 24 Mhz, the vape is umpteen times faster but interestingly enough the AGC had 36 KiB of ROM while the vape only has 24 KiB. Umpteen is a technical term denoting that a straight comparison isn't possible, as the Cortex M0 does more in a single clock cycle than the AGC does but they're also different architectures and the programs running are different.
It's all fun and games to host a blog, but Ukrainian home garage drone manufacturers actually defend territory with these kinds of projects.
Very appropriate to host “Suck it, Jin-Yang!”
It's down. =(
To be fair, it's a disposable vape.
The vape is 503
The magic smoke has escaped :)
The HackerNews hug of death
This is like a really really fast VIC 20!
And its faster than Vercel!
Time for the disposable vape web farm
Anyone got an RSS for this blog?
https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/index.xml
but will it run Doom? :)
504 timeout -- fug of breath
but why? i upload my website to cloudflare pages.
** yeah
VaPS
this is fun af
interesting
Now make a cluster of them running on load balancer