Hosting a website on a disposable vape • Hacker News Board

Re: Hosting a website on a disposable vape

#491

Post by fivestones » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 6:32 PM UTC

fivestones wrote: post #401

mrandish wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just fyi, the device at that link is currently showing $9.62 for a single unit, once logged in and the one-time-only "Welcome deals" are eliminated. But AliExpress pricing can vary hour by hour based on seller, inventory, algorithm, RNG.

I just bought one for $1.07 US with free shipping. I was buying with a new account so I probably got that discount. But even so, before buying I got $2.99 the first time I loaded the page, then $9.89 or thereabouts, and finally $0.99 (which I bought, it had an additional $0.08 in fees for $1.07 total). We’ll see if it shows up and is hackable, but at that price it feels too good to pass up the chance.

Just wanted to update that I got this in the mail today. Not bad—6 days from order to delivery, all for just over a dollar. I haven’t tried to hack it at all yet. Here are photos: https://imgur.com/a/J7S8rEW

Re: Hosting a website on a disposable vape

#492

Post by fivestones » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 8:15 PM UTC

fivestones wrote: post #491

fivestones wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just bought one for $1.07 US with free shipping. I was buying with a new account so I probably got that discount. But even so, before buying I got $2.99 the first time I loaded the page, then $9.89 or thereabouts, and finally $0.99 (which I bought, it had an additional $0.08 in fees for $1.07 total). We’ll see if it shows up and is hackable, but at that price it feels too good to pass up the chance.

Just wanted to update that I got this in the mail today. Not bad—6 days from order to delivery, all for just over a dollar. I haven’t tried to hack it at all yet. Here are photos: https://imgur.com/a/J7S8rEW

One more update: it’s a UZ801, with the Qualcomm MSM8916 chipset (according to `adb shell getprop ro.product.model` etc, and the fact that openstick works). I got it running Debian without much trouble, and it’s working great. I followed the tutorial for openstick at https://wthoog.nl/openstick/ (which seems to be down for me now).

I got the one that’s white with a bit of red near/under the cap.

One other thing that took me a bit to figure out: after removing the cap, the entire back of the device slides off (kind of like a battery cover in a remote) and there is a spot to put a SIM card beneath. Supposedly this does GPS too but I haven’t figured out how yet.

Re: Hosting a website on a disposable vape

#493

Post by LeonenTheDK » Mon, Sep 29, 2025, 4:09 AM UTC

Rzor wrote: post #269

SXX wrote: post #136

Talking of cheap and powerful devices one can also look at Chinese UZ801 4G LTE (Qualcomm MSM8916) dongles. They cost like only $4-5 and pack quite impressive HW: 4GB eMMC, 512MB RAM, actual 4G modem sometimes with 2 sim switching support. Since it's actually old Android SOC there is even GPU and GPS in there. And a lot of work was already done on supporting them: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Zhihe_series_LTE_d…

In case anyone wants a few links containing this SOC or similar, there's an entire article on Hackaday and a bunch of links shared in the comments: https://hackaday.com/2022/08/03/hackable-20-modem-combines-l... (search for Alibaba/Aliexpress/Amazon) Before stumbling on this link I actually found one that mentions a MSM8916 in the description (it even has a screen, sadly no RAM information): https://aliexpress.com/it…

I actually ended up purchasing this unit and getting it running with the instructions from [0] mentioned elsewhere. RAM and everything else seems to be almost identical to the dongles. (4 core A53 CPU running just shy of 1Ghz, 512 MB RAM, 4GB flash storage).

The only couple issues I had getting a plain old Linux on it from the instructions was that it didn't like the image buddy prepared custom for his tutorial in [0]. The solution was to follow the source links in the article, and flash it with a "generic" image from the person I believe originally got Linux working on these types of devices. I can't overstate how good these instructions and discussions in the comments are. The other thing was the modem didn't work, but all that required was copying the files from the original modem partition on the device to /lib/firmware of the new Linux installation. Super straight forward.

Sadly the screen, while it did function with the stock firmware, doesn't work out of the box with the Linux I flashed to it. Digging around, I think I've determined it's a DSI display, with maybe some evidence of Linux showing its there, but the kernel I have wasn't compiled with any support to run it. I'm not knowledgeable at all in this space though so there's that.

It's a great device, all the same benefits of the dongles, but with a battery to boot. If only I knew how to get that screen to work.

[0] https://wvthoog.nl/openstick/