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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

#311

Post by contravariant »

bjackman wrote: post #250
SlightlyLeftPad wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mak…

> Trouble is that, [...], even if they include the charging and refilling bits they can be cheap enough to throw away after use.

Well that is fixable, it's even one of the solutions posited here. Just make them artificially expensive by adding a deposit, which you'll get back when you return it to the shop (instead of throwing it away).

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

#312

Post by [deleted] »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #160
teiferer wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why stop there" is often a reason why nothing gets done. Why do small if you can go big right away? Because going big right away is costly (in social cost, in convincing, in how much people need to change behavior, ...) and that prevents people from doing it in the first place because the threshold is high. Apathy is the result. Better to take a small step first, then get used to the measure / the cost, then have a…

> 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…

[deleted]

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

#313

Post by nubinetwork »

barnacs wrote: post #294

I remember the good old days when a "vape" was just a sturdy housing for a rechargable battery, some heating wire, cotton and juice. The power was determined by the resistance of the coils you built. Those things would last forever.

Until people started launching them into the ceiling...

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

#314

Post by Saline9515 »

teiferer wrote: post #252
piyushpr134 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Plastic ones are almost 100% recyclable Nope, that's a myth. Plastic is essentially unrecyclable. Some types of plastic can be made into "lower" quality types with lots of effort, but there is no circular reuse. The oil and plastic industries want to make you believe that this is all a solved problem, but it very much is not. In contrast, paper and wood products just rot away at the end of their life, and a new tre…

It's not a myth, you can make new items using recycled plastics. Of course, the recycled plastic doesn't have the same properties, but it doesn't mean that it can't be useful to reduce plastic production. Most plastic items do not require pristine materials anyway.

It's the same for paper and cardboard, and it's much better to reuse it as much as possible to avoid cutting a tree. Letting it rot releases the same amount of CO2 than burning it, by the way.

https://plasticsrecycling.org/how-recycling-works/the-plasti...

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

#315

Post by comonoid »

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.

God bless these horrible devices are not disposed in billions every day as bottles are!

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

#316

Post by londons_explore »

torginus wrote: post #233
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…

It also stood out to me how little stuff is in there - there's the uC itself, 3 transistors for heating the flavor canisters, an op-amp for the microphones, but other than that I don't really see anything - no external oscillator, no vrm (though a charger/BMS circuit must be in there somewhere).

I see lots more cost-cutting corners they could take...

Vapes are probably made in enough quantity to warrant custom silicon. Then the mosfets and charge circuit could be on the same die. It could be mounted COB (black blob).

They could probably use a single 'microphone' (pressure sensor) and determine which setting based on a photodiode.

The PCB's could be replaced with a flex PCB which integrates the heating elements (Vegetable Glycerine boils at 290C, whereas Polyimide can do 400C for a short while). Construction of the whole device can then involve putting the PCB inside the injection moulding machine for the cavities, eliminating all assembly steps, joints and potential leaks, and reducing part count

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

#317

Post by kleene_op »

Our whole current civilization could be construed as advanced alien tech servicing a humongous tribe of moronic apes. The fact that one fifth of the internet is dedicated to porn just speaks for itself. Just thinking about all the tech involved, from the capturing of footage using highly sophisticated camera, to the transmission over kilometers of fiber optics, to the stokage into redundant and consistent databases backed by highly optimized hardware and brilliantly engineered file format, to the distribution to your phone device, which is literally a personal computer that fits in your palm.. all of that just to show porn to satisfy your monkey brain.

It seems almost absurd to what length humanity has gone just to satisfy it's primitive needs.

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

#318

Post by Ekaros »

exikyut wrote: post #239
csomar wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone was locked out in a building am staying at (40 something stories) for several hours. When I asked the concierge if I can have a look at the system, it turns out they had none. The whole thing communicated with AWS for some subscription SaaS that provided them with a front-end to register/block cards. And every tap anywhere (elevators/doors/locks) in the building communicated back with this system hosted on A…

I wonder what happened to the building when us-east-1 went down.

Now I am waiting for time when they move us-east-1 physical security to run in us-east-1... Thus locking themselves out when needing some physical intervention on servers to get backup.

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

#319

Post by xandrovich »

geraltofrivia wrote: post #291

As a smoker who transitioned to vaping, I see immense health benefits. My home country (India), and others (Singapore, others?) have outright banned all electronic cigarettes which is a regulation I hate. I acknowledge that vapes reduce barriers to entry to kids. This is partly solvable in countries with strong governance. But disposables? Ban that shit

The issue is that when legislation comes in regarding "disposable" vapes - manufacturers skirt around that by making the fluid chamber a removable pod that can be swapped for others, and a USB-C port for charging the device itself.

The issue is that to the end user this is still tangibly the same product - and mostly gets treated in much the same way as the original "disposable" vapes.

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

#320

Post by onli »

Nextgrid wrote: post #310
sofixa wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Absolute nightmare. Yes, but still probably a million times easier for both the building management and the software vendor to have a SaaS for that, than having to buy hardware to put somewhere in the building (with redundant power, cooling, etc.), and have someone deploy, install, manage, update, etc. all of that.

> with redundant power, cooling, etc The doors the system controls don't have any of this. Hell, the whole building doesn't have any of this. And it definitely doesn't have redundant internet connections to the cloud-based control plane. This is fear-mongering when a passive PC running a container image on boot will suffice plenty. For updates a script that runs on boot and at regular intervals that pulls down the la…

What updates? That would be on a local network and have no internet connection, if done right.
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