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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

#551

Post by loeg »

cons0le wrote: post #391
loeg wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't. That was illegal marijuana vapes. The FDA just hates flavored nicotine products because they're appealing (to both adults and children), and the FDA doesn't want nicotine products to be appealing (because nicotine is perceived to be a public health problem on the scale of tobacco).

Weed disposables are a whole rabbit hole by themselves. You want to buy a disposable? Ok, here, $20 and you're done. But if you want to make the oil at home? Ok, $2000 for lights, timers, nutrients, seeds, and a grow tent. Plus another ~$10,000 for a basic short path distillation setup. And honestly to make anything close to what you get in the disposables, you'll need to hire an expert with experience. And you need…

Your home grow prices are high (even setting aside that you can just buy flower instead of the disposable vape). The right range is hundreds of dollars. And I'm sure making good oil costs somewhat more, but you can make crappy dab sludge (wax?) with some scissors, $10 of isopropyl alcohol, and a baking dish ("QWISO"), and that sludge can be loaded in some kinds of reusable vape.

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

#552

Post by fennecfoxy »

subscribed wrote: post #409
fennecfoxy wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think China is gonna take all of em back?

Why should that be China's problem? Someone imported it, someone's selling it in the stores. If the price of the "disposable" is, say, £5, make the deposit £50. Suddenly all the vapes will end up back at the retailer. And make sure retailer has the financial incentive to return the used disposables and that's it. I'm confident the lawmakers have been bribed to refuse to tackle the problem, otherwise how you can expla…

Well realistically just ban imports. But then people will import them criminally anyway. And to your point; what if Chinese companies assist in evading import bans or customs, as they do now and have done for decades.

Even in the UK, they've added restrictions to it but...surprise, surprise the Turkish/Kurdish corner shops all have a steady supply, with nothing being done about it. As a foreigner living here it's honestly pathetic how disengaged the public here are with things like that. People drive like absolute wankers, too.

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

#553

Post by Ylpertnodi »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #434

I can't believe these are legal, especially in countries that supposedly care a lot about the environment and where people are even quite annoying about, for example, only using the "Eco Mode" on household appliances (also known as the "won't clean your dishes" mode, "won't clean your clothes properly" mode...)

Run your hot water for a few mins prior to turning on your washing machine - makes a hell of a difference, everything else being equal.

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

#555

Post by Zak »

cons0le wrote: post #53
spankalee wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FDA banned any flavored cartridges, which doesn't include disposables Wait, what? Where's the sense in that?

Yeah, in my state, with disposable I can get any flavor. But if I want juice or pods, I can only get nasty tobacco flavor. It's an easy choice. Also, when you do get juice online or from other states, it doesn't hit as hard / the same as whatever they put in the disposables. Someone told me it's because the disposables have vitamin E acetate in them that makes the nicotine get absorbed into your blood quicker. I thin…

Putting vitamin E acetate into vape liquid appears to be extremely hazardous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_vaping_lung_...

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

#556

Post by Aurornis »

cruffle_duffle wrote: post #513
Aurornis wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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!

Your estimate is 1-2 orders of magnitude too low. Small vapes pull a couple amps, as I understand it. Larger vapes can pull over 50-100W. The modded ones into the 200W range. These things can use more power than most CPUs for the brief moment they're on.

The power draw is so high that vape fans compare and review batteries to show which ones can sustain the most power output.

It's an unexpected boon for those of us who use batteries for other things: The vape craze has made more high current batteries available with a lot of user contributed test data.

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

#557

Post by Aurornis »

londons_explore wrote: post #511
Aurornis wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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). An…

> But you need very very little digital logic...

Right, which they already get from a $0.01 MCU

Combining an MCU and multi-amp power transistors into the same package is expensive.

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

#558

Post by freetinker »

ryandrake wrote: post #523
tialaramex wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no pressure to make a good product because nobody making this decision has to use the machine. Everywhere I've worked purchase decisions are made by somebody with no direct contact to the actual usage, maybe if you're lucky they at least asked the people who need the product what the requirements are, otherwise it's just whatever they (who don't use this product) thought would be good. "Key presses are 15x sl…

While this is a decision-making problem, it is also an engineering incompetence problem. No matter what pointy haired boss is yelling about "priorities" ultimately software developers are the ones writing the code, and are responsible for how awful it is. When it comes to priorities about what to write and what to focus on, the buck stops at management and leadership. When it comes to the actual quality of the softwa…

To paraphrase Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to prioritize something when his salary depends upon his not prioritizing it.”

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

#560

Post by OkayPhysicist »

Saline9515 wrote: post #314
teiferer wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 amou…

The vast majority of paper products made from farmed trees (because if you're pulping it anyway you can use really fast growing wood), meaning the CO2 you release from burning/composting paper straws is offset by the next tree planted to replace it.

Excess CO2 in the atmosphere is driven by burning fuels that aren't being actively produced via recaptured atmospheric CO2, such as petroleum.

And the fundamental issue with recycling plastic is that the raw ingredients for virgin plastic are basically free as a byproduct of fuel petroleum extraction. If I want octane, hexane, methane, propane, etc. for fuel, I'm also going to be pulling up and separating out ethane, which is a very quick steam crack and catalyzed polymerization away from polyethylene.

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