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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

#271

Post by slow_typist »

kvdveer wrote: post #226
ninalanyon wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How close are we to smart dust I wonder? How small can we make wireless communications?

> How close are we to smart dust I wonder? How small can we make wireless communications? There's two limiting factors for 'smart dust': power (batteries are the majority weight and volume of this vape), and antennae (minimum size determined by wavelength of carrier wave). I believe you can fit an NFC module in a 5x5mm package, but that does externalize the power supply.

RFID tags are powered wirelessly, one could imagine powering smaller particles when operating on higher frequencies (RFID is on 13.something MHz requiring relatively large coils). A directional antenna could send a pulsed beam to power a subset of the particles in the area and afterwards receive their signals.

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

#272

Post by amelius »

stavros wrote: post #230
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…

Or maybe they think they should be sending each keystroke to a server and waiting for the response.

A server on Mars?

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

#273

Post by tcper »

odiroot wrote: post #145
DiabloD3 wrote: post #2

We really need to ban these things.

Singapore and AFAIK Thailand banned vapes altogether. And it seems to be actually enforced. They have completely different grounds for it but still, there's already some movement in this space.

Vapes illegal, but weed legal, that's great

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

#275

Post by kentiko »

GCUMstlyHarmls wrote: post #228
kev009 wrote: post #4

"I Powered My House Using 500 Disposable vapes" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy-wFixuRVU

Man. I don't actually know anyone who vapes. I see it in public sometimes and just assumed people refilled them - maybe they do. Seeing him hold some up, seeing all that plastic, metal, electronics, all that Work (Joules) expended, in something that you just dump after a day is nuts . I can't think of anything else like that. Maybe plastic water bottles but they don't have even half the materials or complexity? Maybe…

The complexity of a can isn't as extreme as a disposable ARM chip, but it is still quite a sophisticated mass produced object. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUhisi2FBuw

Many daily life, single use objects have a lot of thoughts put into them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj0ze8GnBKA

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

#276

Post by vladvasiliu »

piyushpr134 wrote: post #189
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everybody makes fun of paper straws. Yeah, because they suck . Uh, pun not intended. Paper straws get somewhat soggy and feel bad in your mouth. They are inferior to the plastic straws they purport to replace, so people resist them as much as they can. If you want to actually make a difference with an environmental effort, you need to make something superior . Nobody makes fun of LED light bulbs because (up front c…

paper straws do not make any sense any way you look at it. Are we saying that we are okay to cut trees to make straws when we could make them out of petroleum ? Moreover, paper straws are not even recyclable due to water content which makes them soggy. Plastic ones are almost 100% recyclable Most importantly, unlike plastic straws, they are laced with glue and other chemicals which gets ingested.

Isn't this a bit like "paper" cups for coffee / water? We switched to these at work a few years ago, and it's an all-round horrible experience.

I swear every other one leaks right away, and those that don't can only be refilled once or twice before they do. So you end up going through like 10 of those a day. I also don't know how "eco-friendly" they actually are, since there's a picture of a dead turtle on them under a text to the effect of "don't throw out in nature".

I guess on the plus-side, our company at least provides ceramic cups to their internal employees. But since it's the employees' responsibility to clean them, not everybody is off the disposable cup train.

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

#277

Post by amelius »

rob74 wrote: post #148
tombert wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a world we live in; we have gotten to a point where computers are so small and cheap that they can literally be “disposable”. It’s beautiful, I love it.

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

Let's start by pricing in the negative externalities.

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

#278

Post by slow_typist »

eru wrote: post #262
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We are sitting on 5,970,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg ball of matter. We have a giant nuclear furnace in the centre of the solar system that's providing us with energy.

Some resources are still scarce. And a lot of those 6E24 kg is iron and nickel we can never get to. Another big fraction is basically molten stone. And we really should stop putting more carbon into the atmosphere.

Also, if you go for measures like mass processed, the weight of microchips, pcbs, parts is only a tiny fraction of what has to be processed and build in the supply chain.

Agreed that it is smarter to use oil for plastics then to burn it directly.

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

#280

Post by slow_typist »

smj-edison wrote: post #151
tombert wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a world we live in; we have gotten to a point where computers are so small and cheap that they can literally be “disposable”. It’s beautiful, I love it.

It reminds me of how Sussman talked about someday we'd have computers so small and cheap that we'd mix dozens in our concrete and be put throughout our space.

Russia started with mixing diodes into concrete a while ago- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41933979
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