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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

#661

Post by linkregister »

pluralmonad wrote: post #648
linkregister wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be heartened that your choices are meaningful. The impact of e-waste on ground contamination from landfills in the United States and Europe is negligible, and landfill capacity itself does not approach the level of emergency that planetary warming is for human civilizations. Bicycling, transit usage, and switching to lower-carbon food sources significantly reduces your CO2 footprint. Your example influences others in…

It is pretty hard to be a vegetarian in the US and eat low carbon food. If you grow it yourself or only buy from tiny farms maybe. AG in the US is petroleum based top to bottom.

Since all inputs to animals are coming from fertilizer-based crops, by definition meat is an order of magnitude more carbon intensive than simply eating plants.

Unless you assert that most animal feed is significantly less carbon intense than plants grown for human consumption, this holds. While grazing animals do exist, the vast majority of animal feed is farmed.

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

#662

Post by [deleted] »

tialaramex wrote: post #353
pkolaczk wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which is why when folks nowadays say "you cannot use XYZ for embedded", given what most embedded systems look like, and what many of us used to code on 8 and 16 bit home computers, I can only assert they have no idea how powerful modern embedded systems have become. Yet, I still need to wait about 1 second (!) after each key press when buying a parking ticket and the machine wants me to enter my license plate numbe…

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…

[deleted]

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

#664

Post by bdamm »

boothby wrote: post #658
bdamm wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting story; I went to park at a downtown lot in my local city (Vancouver BC) and the machine had an unusual UI. So I skipped the machine and scanned the QR code for the app. By the time I had taken the elevator up to the lobby of the building I had the app. But then the usability on the app was so bad, that I actually could not figure out how to buy parking. The instructions were clear, but the latency on the…

I live in vancouver and cannot install such apps on my phone. While you may have found the machine's UI unusual, I use them quite often and I suspect that people like me would invalidate your claim... if it went to court. But parking lots aren't the purview of the courts -- enforcement of private parking happens privately, so your sorrows would likely fall on the hardened ears of a privately owned impound lot operato…

It wasn't one of the "Ziply" or "PayByPhone" machines - with which I have no problem, generally. These are much more common.

It was "Parkedin" at 745 Thurlow St, underground lot. I haven't encountered it anywhere else. Do me a favour, go park there and see for yourself.

Curious that you'd be willing to invalidate my claim without knowing what service it was.

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

#665

Post by estimator7292 »

londons_explore wrote: post #316
torginus wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also stood out to me how little stuff is in there - there's the uC itself, 3 transistors for heating the flavor canisters, an op-amp for the microphones, but other than that I don't really see anything - no external oscillator, no vrm (though a charger/BMS circuit must be in there somewhere).

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…

There are many, many, many different types and designs of vapes. There are plentiful ASICS on the market specifically for vapes and e-cigarettes.

The cheapest variety is a tiny PCB built into the microphone. It's three wires for the battery and heater, and that's it. Sometimes they include a cheap and nasty battery charger. All in a single grain of sand for almost free.

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

#666

Post by eru »

tzs wrote: post #590
spacebanana7 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like an almost Malthusian viewpoint. The world has effectively infinite resources, getting more is usually just a matter of figuring out better extraction techniques or using better energy.

The world only has effectively infinite resources if growth slows down, because exponentials get out of hand surprisingly quickly. For example at 1% energy growth per year it would only take around 9-10k years before to reach an annual consumption equal to all the energy in the Milky Way galaxy. By "all the energy" I don't just mean consuming all the solar energy from all the stars, and using all the fissionable mate…

Eh, because the speed of light is finite, our growth in resource usage will have to 'slow down' to cubic after a while. Sure.

We are very far from that.

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

#667

Post by pploug »

Remember interviewing for a security role at Phillip Morris who owns the IQOS e-cigaret brand. They bragged about how the device phoned home every time it could get a bluetooth or wifi connection, to inform of consumption amount and patterns - so they could proactively send users more nicotine.

He dramatically revealed that they were no longer selling tobacco, but rather "Nicotine as a service"

Needless to say, I decided not to work for a merchant of death

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

#668

Post by mordv »

floro wrote: post #486
willtemperley wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen the list of substances found in these things? https://www.unodc.org/LSS/Announcement/Details/8afbc6e8-9439...

You get downvoted because you're implying substances like methamphetamine are common in vapes (as per your linked article), which it obviously is not, and already highly illegal. The truth is you can mix your own vape juice from just PG, VG and nicotine. Which are completely harmless to eat (except nicotine) and used in food products. A more rational discussion would be about if inhaling PG and VG is harmful to the l…

> Which are completely harmless to eat (except nicotine) and used in food products

Or we think so unless proven otherwise.

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

#669

Post by yencabulator »

jon-wood wrote: post #362
sofixa wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Absolute nightmare. Yes, but still probably a million times easier for both the building management and the software vendor to have a SaaS for that, than having to buy hardware to put somewhere in the building (with redundant power, cooling, etc.), and have someone deploy, install, manage, update, etc. all of that.

Its absolutely possible to have both a SaaS based control plane and continue functioning if the internet connection/control plane becomes unavailable for a period. There's presumably hardware on site anyway to forward requests to the servers which are doing access control, it wouldn't be difficult to have that hardware keep a local cache of the current configuration. Done that way you might find you can't make change…

Yes, but your average webdev doesn't know how to program that SaaS, so the market is saturated with bad software.

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

#670

Post by Saline9515 »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #560
Saline9515 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Tree farming has a major environmental impact and degrades natural environments, wildlife and soils. A tree farm is not a forest at all.

Some products such as cotton are even more destructive, which is why the cotton tote bag is an environmental absurdity and the plastic equivalent is much better.

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