It feels like we’ve turned every physical object into a distributed system with firmware updates, a network stack, and a failure mode that requires rebooting your house. All that compute just to do the same job the purely mechanical version did for decades, except now it can also crash.
There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
421–430 of 673 posts
Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
#422For 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…
The idea that people are smoking arm chips makes me laugh.
Not smoking, vaping - better for your health but not RISC free.
Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surprisingly, Big Tobacco does not really likes vapes because it's not them, and eats in their profit margin. If any, they lobby against vapes and specifically disposable vapes.
That hasn’t been true here in New Zealand. Although the nuance around what counts as a vape may be where this is happening.
YMMV, but it's been the case in France. They were behind the ban on disposable non rechargeable vapes, because kids bought them as a candy. They'd prefer they buy actual cigarettes.
Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
> Agreed that it is smarter to use oil for plastics then to burn it directly. My argument is that as long as we are still burning oil and gas, we might as well burn old plastic instead of new oil and gas. If/when we stop burning oil and gas, then we can think more seriously about recycling plastic.
Did you ever try to burn plastic?
1) Plastic is not liquid, so you can't pipe it to a gas or oil power plant. You may argue that coal isn't liquid either, but continue reading...
2) Burning plastic generates toxic fumes.
3) Plastic ash is sticky and very difficult to clean.
Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
#425It's hard to take these vape teardowns seriously when they call Propyleenglycol, nictotine salts, and flavors "poison".
It's truly a marvel of anti-scientific thinking.
Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
#426Earlier 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…
> Nobody makes fun of LED light bulbs because (up front cost aside) they are wildly superior to incandescent. There's burgeoning movement called "PWM sensitive"[1] that's opposed to (cheap) LED lights. [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/PWM_Sensitive/
The frequencies that they claim affect them are disputable but the flickering in some cheap LED lights is real. Badly/cheaply designed electronics can have flicker as bad as 50 Hz if they use half bridge diode rectification only (e.g. that time I was passing through Geneva airport and the Christmas lights flickered in my peripheral vision)
Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why though? Bottles/cans are easily recycled and I believe the small reimbursement is easily recovered during the recycling costs. It's not profitable to recycle small electronic devices otherwise you'd see heaps of shops doing it. It's toxic, hazardous and labour intensive. 100 times the deposit amount would be like $5-10 USD per-device which is insane. I do agree that any retailers should be required to take back e…
> It's not profitable to recycle small electronic devices otherwise you'd see heaps of shops doing it. It's toxic, hazardous and labour intensive. Sounds like they should be banning their sale and/or production then, just like many jurisdictions have been with plastics and other non-recyclable items. These devices are not an essential-to-life item where the waste produced is justifiable, especially when you consider…
I think waste management should be required to scan the garbage and remove useful items, i.e. recyclables. This would take the burden off consumers and allow more items like this to be intercepted. The technology is there, why not force the corporation to innovative?
Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what happened to the building when the internet went down. How do you get into the room to reboot the router?
There is probably a break-glass procedure for such cases, like, break the literal window.
Is that why there is a brick next to the procedure manual?
Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Interpreters don't have to be slow. Forth is usually interpreted and pretty fast. And, of course, we have very fast Javascript engines these days. Python speed is being worked on, but it's pretty slow, true.
Classic Forth Dimensions article: Why Forth Isn't Slow
* https://www.forth.org/fd/FD-V06N5.pdf
Basically it is because Forth programs are fairly flat and don't go deep into subfunctions. So the interpreter overhead is not that great and the processor spends most of the time running the machine code that underlays the primitives that live at the bottom of the program.
Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
#430It's wild to think about the e-waste implications of this. We are effectively throwing away a basic smartphone's worth of complexity and lithium every week.