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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

#471

Post by kubb »

roflmaostc wrote: post #375
st_goliath wrote: post #335

A lovely video from a Shenzhen factory, mass producing disposable vapes, in case someone's interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WohEiRvn2Dg+ Most likely a promotional from the looks of it. I myself stumbled over it a about a year ago, when someone posted it on an IRC channel.

lol, at 0:15 someone is literally testing the vapes with their mouth. I hope they don't do that all day long Later at 6:45 they show more people testing them

It’s hard to know for sure what’s acceptable when it comes to working conditions in China. The information we get is incredibly limited. Most of what makes it through is propaganda.

That said, it wouldn’t surprise me if he does it all day long, 6 days per week.

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

#472

Post by bluGill »

scrumper wrote: post #456
lallysingh wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first guess was debouncing. They assume that the switches are worn out, deeply weathered, and cheaply made. Each press will cause the signal to oscillate and they're taking their sweet time to register it. When the device is new this is an absurd amount of time to wait. As the device degrades over 10, 20 years, that programming will keep it working the same. Awful the entire time, yes, but the same as the day it w…

I was late for a train at my local station and the parking machine was taking ages to respond to keypresses. I could see the training pulling up to the platform and I was still stuck entering the second digit of seven. In my shameful frustration I hit the machine fairly hard. While the button presses might take a while to register, the anti-tamper alarm has really low latency and is also quite loud.

You need to find the right person to complain to. Here we are sympathetic, but can't do anything.

The right person is the other riders on the train - but the hard part is to frame this such that they join you on a march to the the agency that owns that machines to complain. I wish you the best of luck figuring out how to do that (I don't know how to do it - and if I did there are might higher priority things that need to be fixed).

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

#473

Post by bluGill »

mystifyingpoi wrote: post #405
blitzar wrote: post #351

Earlier 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.

A lot of modern glass is hard to break. In many cases this is a safety feature (if you can't break the glass you can't get shoved out the window in a fight...)

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

#474

Post by evandrofisico »

azornathogron wrote: post #368
dionys wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

first one to run doom on a vape would do great numbers on youtube

Already been done.

Not doom, but (sorta) a website https://hackaday.com/2025/09/15/hosting-a-website-on-a-dispo...

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

#475

Post by bluGill »

lazide wrote: post #393
Nextgrid wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some PC somewhere with storage is a bigger problem Both an embedded microcontroller and a PC have storage. The reason you can power-cycle a microcontroller at will is because that storage is read-only and only a specific portion dedicated to state is writable (and the device can be reset if that ever gets corrupted). Use a buildroot/yocto image on the PC with read-only partitions and a separate state partition that…

PCs are orders of magnitude more complex, with a lot more to break. Sounds like a whole lot of work for… what? Assuming the internet connection and AWS work of course. Which they won’t always, then oops.

A large number of embedded micro controllers are just PCs running Yocto linux configured as GP said. You can save money with a $.05 micro controller, but in most cases the development costs to make that entire system work are more than just buying an off the shelf raspberry pi.

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

#476

Post by barnas2 »

I don't smoke/vape, but I saw some pretty absurd models available recently that really piqued my interest. One had a touchscreen, could run some basic apps, and had wifi/bluetooth support. The other had a d-pad + buttons built in and a few ripoffs of classic games you could play. I bought one of each to start ripping them apart on my work bench and playing with the firmware. Unfortunately I got busy and haven't done much more than look at the internals. They're using some sort of cheap smart watch SoC. It's wild you can get a battery, touchscreen, charging circuit, and a microprocessor for like $12.

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

#477

Post by evandrofisico »

Liftyee wrote: post #426
woadwarrior01 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

yep, i had one led stripe with a controller with a flickering that was kinda invisible to the eye, but very noticeable on camera.

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

#478

Post by dgacmu »

sofixa wrote: post #459
quickthrowman wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cooling for a card access system? A card access system requires zero cooling, it’s a DC power supply or AC transformer and a microcontroller that fits in a small unvented metal enclosure. It requires no management other than activating and deactivating badges. There is no reason to have any of the lock and unlock functionality tied to the cloud, it’s just shitty engineering by a company who wants to extract rent from…

The server running that system needs cooling, yes. You can't just shove it in a closet with zero thought and expect it to not overheat/shut down/catch fire, unless you live in the Arctic.

I have a little fanless mini PC that runs various stuff around my house, including homeassistant. The case is basically a big heat sink.

It started crashing during backups.

The solution was to stick a fan on it. :( This is literally a box _designed to not need a fan_. And yet. It now has a fan and has been stable for months. And it's not even in a closet - it's wall-mounted with lots of available air around it.

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

#479

Post by pjmlp »

tiagod wrote: post #470
pjmlp wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most countries don't do enough at all. For example Germany, while the country is famous for the whole splitting the garbage, I am still waiting after 20 years to see the kitchen oil recycling recipients as we have in Portugal. As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in place, and human nature is as such that hardly anyone will drive to the next recycling center to deliver a single device that broke down,…

>As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in place I Portugal there is Rede Electrão. You can deposit those devices in a lot of supermarkets, stores and fire stations.

Thanks for the heads up, I thought the only way was to drive down the city recycling center where they get pilled up inside a shipping container.

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

#480

Post by pjmlp »

HighGoldstein wrote: post #403
pjmlp wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most countries don't do enough at all. For example Germany, while the country is famous for the whole splitting the garbage, I am still waiting after 20 years to see the kitchen oil recycling recipients as we have in Portugal. As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in place, and human nature is as such that hardly anyone will drive to the next recycling center to deliver a single device that broke down,…

> For example Germany, while the country is famous for the whole splitting the garbage, I am still waiting after 20 years to see the kitchen oil recycling recipients as we have in Portugal. Because German environmental policy is about virtue signalling to keep the plebs busy, not solving environmental problems. Nuclear power plants replaced by coal and natural gas, obsession with recycling but nothing done about disp…

Yeah, what is so hard to have something like this? Sorry only in portuguese, you will need to use automatic translation on it.

https://www.prio.pt/pt/prio-ecowaste

This is only one of the places, there are others where used oil can be brought in.

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