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There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

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Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#241

Post by csomar »

smashed wrote: post #3

Many countries have deposits for single use bottles/cans but an electronic device with a lipo battery is seen as perfectly fine to throw away. These things should have 100 times the deposit amount of a can of soda with mandatory requirements for retailers to take the 'empties' back.

I don't want to advertise for the brand but I bought a disposable "looking" vape today where they split the liquid from the core. So the end result is a very small stick but is actually re-usable and they had a re-cycling digital bin.

Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#242

Post by anthk »

pjmlp wrote: post #224
pkolaczk wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which is why when folks nowadays say "you cannot use XYZ for embedded", given what most embedded systems look like, and what many of us used to code on 8 and 16 bit home computers, I can only assert they have no idea how powerful modern embedded systems have become. Yet, I still need to wait about 1 second (!) after each key press when buying a parking ticket and the machine wants me to enter my license plate numbe…

What can you expect, when people assume as normal shipping the browser alongside the "native" application, and scripting languages using an interpreter are used in production code? Maybe that ticket machine was coded in MicroPython. /s

- TCL/Tk slowish under P3 times, decent enough under P4 with SSE2. AMSN wasn't that bad back in the day, and with 8.6 the occasional UI locks went away.

- Visual Basic. Yes, it was interpreter, and you used to like it. GUI ran fast, good for small games and management software. The rest... oh, they tried to create a C64 emulator under VB, it ran many times slower than one created in C. Nowadays, with a P4 with SSE2 and up you could emulate it at decent speeds with TCL/Tk 8.6 since they got some optimized interpreter. IDK about VB6, probably the same case. But at least we know TCL/Tk got improved on multiprocessing and the like. VB6 was stuck in time.

- TCL can call C code with ease, since the early 90's. Not the case with Electron. And JS really sucks with no standard library. With Electron, the UI can be very taxing, even if they bundle FFMPEG and the like. Tk UI can run on a toaster.

- Yeah, there is C#... but it isn't as snappy and portable TCL/Tk with IronTCL, where it even targets Windows XP. You have JimTCL where it can run on scraps. No Tk, but the language it's close in syntax to TCL, it has networking and TLS support and OFC has damn easy C interops. And if you are a competent programmer, you can see it has some alpha SDL2 bindings. Extend those and you can write a dumb UI with Nuklear or similar in days. Speed? It won't win against other languages on number crunching, but for sure it could be put to drive some machines.

Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#243

Post by pbhjpbhj »

eru wrote: post #235
rob74 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For my part, I hate anything explicitly labeled "disposable". As the author writes, you're supposed to recycle it, but how many people will do that if it has "disposable" written on it? Even worse, if it was truly disposable they could use a non-rechargeable battery, but because they have to keep up the pretense of it being reusable, they have to include a rechargeable battery with more dodgy chemistry that probably…

Why recycle things that you can make them cheaper, with less resources and in higher quality from scratch? (The above is not so much about processors, but about plastics. As long as we are still burning any fossil fuels at all, we are probably better off holding off on recycling and instead burning the plastic for electricity to use ever so slightly less new fossil fuels for power, and instead use the virgin fossil f…

Is that a genuine question, or are you parodying an ignorant point of view?

The World has limited resources, we don't have a spare.

Do you need it spelling out more clearly?

Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#244

Post by lm28469 »

eru wrote: post #238
smashed wrote: post #3

Many countries have deposits for single use bottles/cans but an electronic device with a lipo battery is seen as perfectly fine to throw away. These things should have 100 times the deposit amount of a can of soda with mandatory requirements for retailers to take the 'empties' back.

> Many countries have deposits for single use bottles/cans [...] Yeah, the deposits for cans are a bit stupid: people already widely recycle aluminum (and scrap metals in general) purely for commercial reasons. No need for extra regulation there like mandatory deposits.

It's much easier to recycle things when everyone participate and bring their trash to a common place.

I've lived in places with no deposits and there is much much much more littering compared to places having deposits on every types of metal/plastic beverage containers

Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#245

Post by haritha-j »

This is a really interesting topic but not a thorough article imo. I don't really understand how the 6 flavours come about, what the sucking positions the author mentions are etc. Would love it if you go into more detail. Also, now I have a very strong urge to buy one of these things and take it apart. Inspirational!

Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#246

Post by torginus »

SuperMouse wrote: post #126
GeertB wrote: post #72

For these devices the microcontroller needs to be super cheap. Microcontrollers like the Puya PY32 Series (e.g., PY32C642, PY32F002/F030) can cost in the $0.02 - $0.05 range for the kind of many-million volumes applicable for disposable vapes. These are 32-bit ARM Cortex M0 MCUs, running at a 24 MHz clock or similar, some with 24 KB of ROM and maybe 3 KB of RAM! To put into context: this is 3x the ROM/RAM of the ZX81…

I've bought hundreds of Puya's for my lab stock on LCSC. Neat little things!

How usable are they for hacking? I've had bad experiences with more obscure chips requiring custom programmers/debuggers.

Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#247

Post by domh »

Earw0rm wrote: post #128
normie3000 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Closer to 15 or 20 in greater London in the UK. Weren't disposable vapes banned in UK in May 2025? Is the problem still that big?

Sort of. "Single use disposables" were banned, but the companies switched immediately to a two-part unit which, AFAICT, is still used and thrown away in exactly the same fashion.

Sample size of 1, but I have a friend who does buy the refills and charges the original unit. Every shop that sells the combination units also seems to sell the refills (at least around here).

Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#248

Post by RulerOf »

Freedumbs wrote: post #211
smashed wrote: post #3

Many countries have deposits for single use bottles/cans but an electronic device with a lipo battery is seen as perfectly fine to throw away. These things should have 100 times the deposit amount of a can of soda with mandatory requirements for retailers to take the 'empties' back.

Based on your reply you haven't fully considered context. Smokers don't care about themselves or else they wouldn't smoke. As demonstrated by the article, you can see proof that they also don't care for the environment. What makes you think people who intentionally pay to kill themselves and then throw the waste on the ground instead of trash will ever recycle?

Smoking is expensive, and people carry these in their pockets, and replace them within hours once they run dry.

If there were a deposit scheme of say five bucks a piece, I'd wager you'd see >80% return rates with every purchase.

Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#249

Post by pbhjpbhj »

mngnt wrote: post #170
stmL wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on that? Edit: I'm actually curious l, i don't know how recycling supposed to work for electronics and how it can be a scam.

This youtube video explains why plastic recycling exists, how it's mostly ineffective and why is it a scam created to normalize one-use plastic. This basically applies to electronics and others. "Why would I reuse or reduce, I can buy, consume an recycle". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g

Tax CEOs of vape companies the percentage of their vapes that their company doesn't physically retrieve from customers to be recycled ...

Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#250

Post by bjackman »

SlightlyLeftPad wrote: post #208
smashed wrote: post #3

Many countries have deposits for single use bottles/cans but an electronic device with a lipo battery is seen as perfectly fine to throw away. These things should have 100 times the deposit amount of a can of soda with mandatory requirements for retailers to take the 'empties' back.

They should just be banned outright. In no world is this going to end up in bins 100% of the time. Disposable really means it’s destined for the trash at best, and just simply litter at worst. This guy[1] explains the problem quite well. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy-wFixuRVU

Yeah ban is the answer. Trouble is that, as shown in the article, even if they include the charging and refilling bits they can be cheap enough to throw away after use.

Taxing waste is one part of the story but it's actually a really good thing that vaping is cheaper than smoking so this can only go so far before it's counterproductive.

I think the answers lie in stuff like banning sale of pre-filled ones. If you make people buy a separate bottle of nicotine liquid (and you enforce that this is quite a large minimum size, like we already do with tobacco) and fill the device up before they use it, I think they are much more likely to refill it when it's empty and recharge it when it's dead.

Maybe another thing could be restricting points of sale. I bet a lot of the waste comes from drunk people buying them at 10pm in the corner shop near the pub. If you make people plan ahead that might also help.

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