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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

#511

Post by londons_explore »

Aurornis wrote: post #503
londons_explore wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 elemen…

> Vapes are probably made in enough quantity to warrant custom silicon Not when the MCUs might cost a penny and the other parts aren’t much more. Putting high power electronics and analog into the same custom silicon as a custom digital logic is nontrivial. They’re made on different processes.

But you need very very little digital logic... The same kind of quantity to do the little power indicator LED's on a battery bank (which are charlieplexed btw), and thats done in the same ASIC that also has the 5V boost power supply (multi-amp gnd isolated n type mosfet) and charge circuitry involving voltage references and laser tuned comparators, and sometimes negotiates USB-C PD as well (needs an internal ROM). And the whole thing needs to be really cheap and with a standby current of uA's.

As long as you aren't interested in multi-Mhz operation, combining the rest at very low cost isn't too tricky.

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

#512

Post by nottorp »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #293
nottorp wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh. I am in the EU. For washing machines specifically, I get a tiny discount when I buy a new one for having them pick up the old one for recycling. Possibly for freezers too, but for some reason my washers break but the freezer doesn't. Not all stores do that though, if I buy from one that doesn't I can call my local recycling center and they'll eventually get around to picking up the old appliance from your home.…

> for some reason my washers break but the freezer doesn't. The properties of your running water and the presence of very much moving parts in the former?

Noo it can't be that! I definitely don't have to rebalance the washer regularly to stop it from dancing around my bathroom!

It's one of them new solid state washers designed by "AI". Very advanced technology!

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

#513

Post by cruffle_duffle »

Aurornis wrote: post #503
londons_explore wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 elemen…

> Vapes are probably made in enough quantity to warrant custom silicon Not when the MCUs might cost a penny and the other parts aren’t much more. Putting high power electronics and analog into the same custom silicon as a custom digital logic is nontrivial. They’re made on different processes.

I love the term “high power” even though we are talking maybe a watt or two when that bad boy’s element is doing its thing!

I mean relatively it absolutely is high power. The quiescent current on that thing has to be microamps…

It’s just funny because to me “high power” is hundreds or thousands of watts. Like an incandescent light bulb or a hair dryer. Or at least it was until I started tinkering with battery powered microcontrollers and doing math to realize exactly how long an 18650 might power a small strip of individually addressable LED’s…

“High power” is a very relative term :-)

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

#514

Post by ajb »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #396
ajb wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU and UK already require sellers to recycle electronics, and we can still afford washing machines. Here is Amazon's page: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeI...

Thinking for a moment what "recycling" a washing machine would look like and it's very obvious it would just mean paying a 3rd party to dump it in the 3rd world somewhere to be stripped if at all. Hard to imagine it's not causing more environmental damage by having this policy.

A washing machine has a decent amount of metal in it, that's definitely going to be recycled, as it has value. A policy like this could cause environmental damage, but saying that it's inevitable is just defeatist. In fact the manufacturer is the one with the knowledge to recycle stuff properly as they know what went into it. This is actually a way to work with the market. Any other option, other than just giving up, involves more government intervention.

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

#517

Post by cruffle_duffle »

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.

We are going to have to rethink power for smart dust. Like consider that no creature out there is powered by batteries. From the biggest land animal to the smallest microbe it’s all chemistry.

Maybe the smart dust will have to eat microbes and stuff to stay active.

As for communication, we can’t go shoving antennas in them as then they’d be larger than dust. And you can’t use the optical part of the spectrum because of interference with basically everything. You can’t use wavelengths smaller either as you get into UV and high radiation. There is the terahertz radio spectrum [0] between 3mm and 30um that is pretty open and not utilized at all because we haven’t figured out how to make good transmitters. Plus the spectrum isn’t very useful as it isn’t very penetrating and water vapor absorbs it… and it requires lots of power.

Smart dust might have to be more of a distributed computer or something. Or a micro machine that uses chemistry and mechanical magic to do its operations.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terahertz_radiation

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

#518

Post by trinix912 »

sofixa wrote: post #501
trinix912 wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The IT guy walks in and replaces/restarts the box instead of waiting for the gods of AWS to descent to earth and restart theirs. They have direct control vs. waiting for something magic to happen.

The building has an onsite IT guy with enough spares to fix anything that could go wrong with the box?

Have you ever actually seen these systems in person? It's usually a microcontroller which already rules out a ton of stuff you're talking about. Serious places will buy 2-3 of them at the time of installation to have some spares. The ones here are "user-replaceable" as well (unplug these three cables, replace the box, plug them back in). It's not some mysterious bunch-of-wires-on-arduino-pins magic box that nobody dares to touch.

The one at my previous office even had centralized management through an RS232 connection to a PC. No internet and related downtime at all. And I don't recall us ever being locked out because of that.

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

#520

Post by stonemetal12 »

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…

Something I recently found out about ARM Cortex M0s, they are small enough and cheap enough that they get used in USB cables to handle protocol negotiation between devices.

Given that the moon lander had a 1Mhz processor and 4kb of ram means we landed on the moon with the compute power of a Vape or USB cable. Wild times indeed.

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