Hosting a website on a disposable vape

https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/

284•dmazin•2h ago

Comments

jsheard•1h ago

Previously discussed, but I think that first submission fell off the frontpage early because it linked directly to the vapeserver which instantly died under load: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45243800

topherjaynes•1h ago

It let out one last valiant puff of smoke after it succumbed to load.

markstos•1h ago

I found of these that had a built-in retro game console with screen. Like, the kind of little game that a small child would be interested in. So frustrating.

ivape•1h ago

I wonder how much cost would be added if they included a small usb storage drive in those things. You could incentivize non-disposal because people would have a million of those things.

It’s really hard to quite vaping btw.

RedShift1•1h ago

> It’s really hard to quite vaping btw.

They put addictive stuff in vapes, because of course they do.

Dilettante_•6m ago

The Addictive Stuff™ is literally the core feature of the item. Your comment makes it sound like the producers are nefariously and covertly adding nicotine to a product which normally would not have any? It's like saying "These scoundrel breweries! They're making beer that gets you drunk!"

jdoliner•1h ago

Hey can you print this paper off my vape bro? I need to turn it in to my next class.

zetanor•1h ago

Add a GPS and a few propellers to vapes so they can fly themselves directly into the nearest river, lake or (as a last resort) ocean once they're empty.

ch4s3•59m ago

Why wait until they're empty, let he fish vape I say!

Y_Y•42m ago

Self-smoked salmon

shadowgovt•26m ago

If the eels get car batteries, the fish can have a little vape, as a treat.

cardanome•53m ago

I mean disposable vapes are just complete idiocy to begin with.

Vapes with pods are less expensive in the long run and offer a vastly superior vaping experience. You can get liquid for dirt cheap. If you smoke heavily, you might offset the initial investment in a week or two.

Disposable vapes offer zero advantages. They are only good if you want to "just try" it once or that is what you are going to tell yourself in your career of producing e-waste.

unmotivated-hmn•3m ago

What they offer is ubiquity and the turnkey nature. You can walk into any nearby smoke shop, get one and use it immediately. You don't have to carry around a bottle of liquid and extra coils and paper towels/napkins for the inevitable leak.

I stopped vaping a little while ago but when I did vape, there was no clear standard of pod systems. You sure could walk into a nearby smoke shop but it was unlikely that you'd find your ideal pod/coil/liquid.

It's hard to take back the convenience people have gotten used to. I think one idea could be that disposable vapes become recyclable vapes. They should cost $15 more and buyers should get back $10 when they return it for recycling. This is nicotine we're talking about so the buyer is always coming back anyway.

RedShift1•1h ago

We need to reduce microplastics.

Let's put microcontrollers into disposable vapes.

I don't know if I'm sad or happy.

grues-dinner•20m ago

The micro in this thing is a WQFN-16 (W = very very thin, thinner than V for very) with 3x3x0.75mm body. That's around a fiftieth of a gram of plastic.

I think the bigger SOIC chip is probably the battery charge IC. And then a gram or two of PCB epoxy.

In terms of plastics waste volume, the casing and tank is probably nearly all of the content. So the problem is a disposable vape bring a thing at all, not really the microcontroller in there.

citizenpaul•1m ago

The mfg/mining process for the chips is probably equally bad.

All for a device to help you develop health problems.

konfusinomicon•1h ago

living that cloud life

x187463•1h ago

Re-using this sort of device is super cool. I can imagine a post-apocalyptic scenario where a city is run on a hodgepodge of random computing devices like this.

I will say, though, disposable vapes with microcontrollers inside (and even full games and screens from recent reporting) are an egregious source of e-waste. Many layers of stupid are present here.

Mistletoe•1h ago

Will the Butlerian Jihad find all the vapes?

ffsm8•53m ago

It sometimes surprises me how the dune series was created out of the culture of the Muslim Faith (and he wasn't even coy about it, he straight up said so back when it was published) - with super obvious tells like literally calling the war against machines a "jihad", which is the word Muslims call their holy war against non believers and more obsessively woke people haven't jumped on it decrying "Muslim phobia!1" whenever it's referenced.

zknow•50m ago

Really? I thought that it was kind of a ecumenist religion that included themes from many religions.

NemoNobody•45m ago

It is.

overfeed•15m ago

I hope gp goes on a tear about the Orange Catholic Bible next, and how outrageous its non-subtle references are.

ffsm8•15m ago

not really, pretty old overview on it - but kept up to date it seems (current references to interviews)

https://baheyeldin.com/literature/arabic-and-islamic-themes-...

its true that the concept of a _holy war_ isnt unique to the muslim faith though. I never claimed that either however.

It's slightly surprising to me how few people seem to be aware of that in HN. Was expecting the general readership here to be a little less obsessively righteous and uninformed on a topic like this, but ymmv I guess

i80and•36m ago

This is an exceedingly strange comment -- you made up a silly thing to get upset about, and are making fun of people who aren't upset about the thing, because you think it's the sort of thing they would be upset about, even though it isn't and you say as much?

This feels like a whole new category of straw man.

jeej•25m ago

"thinking of inventing a new type of person to get mad at on here. maybe people who carry too many keys around.. i dont know yet"

-Dril

staplers•36m ago

  obsessively woke people

Because most "woke" stuff is made up or blown out of proportion by people on the internet. One person might do one thing and the video/meme goes viral and people eat up the story like its some movement

Findecanor•11m ago

The word "jihad" has a wider meaning than "holy war". It would better be translated into "worthy struggle" — with "worthy" being very subjective.

Islam is in fact the largest religion (by worshippers) in the world today, so Frank Herbert's assumption that a culture derived from it would be dominant in a future society is just extrapolation.

beAbU•55m ago

I've been aware about the perfectly reusable lithium batteries inside these disposable vapes, which is egregious enough.

But the one in the FTA comes with a full fat microcontroller and USB-C connector! I'm not clear if these connectors are accessible outside or if you need to break open the packaging before being able to get to it.

Like you said: "Many layers of stupid are present here"

All that hardware must surely be worth more than half the value of the actual product!

rglullis•43m ago

Between (a) component that costs tens of cents to mass produce and can be bought off the shelf and is reusable vs (b) component that needs actual experienced electronics engineers working on a single-use design that can not be repurposed later, I think we'd see that (a) might end up being less wasteful.

afiori•13m ago

> can not be repurposed later

whether it can be repurposed is worth little in being wasteful if >99% go to the landfill.

> I think we'd see that (a) might end up being less wasteful.

Monetarily? sure. Environmentally? unlikely

dijit•8m ago

I don't follow the logic.

Because humans are expensive? Or because we can maybe re-use the components if an (expensive) human comes and retrieves the components?

Sorry for being dumb here.

maeln•42m ago

Hope you don't get caught in Luddic Path's space with your stash of contraband disposable vape

patapong•39m ago

Another example: One-time covid tests with a microcontroller, sensor to read the result and bluetooth to connect to a phone to display the results. Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29698887

kilroy123•38m ago

Makes me think of these:

https://duskos.org https://collapseos.org

spicyusername•19m ago

It's a shame negative externalities like this are basically impossible to include in the up-front price.

reaperducer•13m ago

It's a shame negative externalities like this are basically impossible to include in the up-front price.

You mean like add the cost of a MRI to the price of a pack of cigarettes?

palata•6m ago

I feel like a law saying "don't put electronics in disposable products" would do the job.

palata•7m ago

The fact that selling such a thing is profitable means that we lack regulations somewhere.

NoiseBert69•1h ago

I bought a few hundred Puyas for my lab as stock for projects. They are quite capable and very cheap uCs to have around.

grues-dinner•1h ago

Apparently they're cheap because they're a flash memory company that bolts a little CPU onto their own flash, rather than a CPU company having to then buy the more expensive flash with a markup.

jerf•1h ago

The mismatch between the Ancient Specs of Yore is kind of interesting. The Commodore 64 had 64KB of RAM, but that RAM was attached to an 8-bit, 1MHz CPU. This thing has call it half the RAM of a Commodore 64, but it's attached to a 32-bit 24MHz CPU the 1980s could only dream of. And it's disposable in 2025. Pretty impressive in a weird way.

justincormack•55m ago

Its only got 3k of RAM, 24k of flash. Although modern flash is sometimes the same bandwidth as memory was if you go back a bit, although not latency of course.

Narishma•35m ago

It's got only 3KB of RAM, less than even the VIC-20.

jerf•30m ago

Whoops, yes. I stand corrected. Tack another order of magnitude or so on to the mismatch.

peteforde•1h ago

I see that as of the time of this comment, he hasn't run Doom on it.

Yet?

jsheard•1h ago

3kb of RAM and 24kb of flash is a bit tight for Doom unfortunately. It has been ported to another Cortex-M0+ microcontroller, the RP2040, but that has 264kb of RAM plus megabytes of flash and the game still barely fits.

reaperducer•17m ago

I see that as of the time of this comment, he hasn't run Doom on it.

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of them…

droobles•1h ago

Long live hacking! This is what Hacker News is all about. Great article and fun project!

ChrisArchitect•51m ago

[dupe] More discussion on this submission by the dev: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45243800

nusl•50m ago

Disposable vapes are an abomination that somehow society has normalised.

mcdonje•27m ago

Society tends to normalize things that have ad budgets.

NoSalt•17m ago

Not to mention the EXTREME damage it can do to a person's lungs, and do this damage very quickly.

broabprobe•40m ago

very impressive, I wonder if it would run Collapse OS (https://collapseos.org/)

shadowgovt•34m ago

That's gotta be between 75 and 90% less damaging to humanity than the designed use of a disposable vape. Well done, Bogdan!

I'm reminded of the project Tom7 put together a few years back where he used the surplus components inside a digital COVID kit as spare memory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio

1970-01-01•26m ago

I always forget about the idea that IPv6 was intended to allow literally everything to have an address. The mouse, keyboard, display, etc. Seems like a bad idea now, but back then it was considered as part of the overall plan for the nearly infinite space. Maybe the joke is still missing a punchline. We've had this generic device interface for decades but decided on proprietary and arbitrary standards of device communication to make our lives easier in the short-term.

distances•20m ago

By law, neither electronics nor batteries can be disposed of with generic waste. This is the case in the EU, at least. So how are people then disposing these devices?

Disclaimer: I do know the answer, but I'd rather pretend that people actually follow the law.

avian•3m ago

The vape comes with a miniature laser-engraved WEEE crossed-out trash can symbol so everything is fine.

NoSalt•18m ago

The current state of technology is ... weird. From AI doing our art instead of our work, to hosting a website on an eCigarette. "Weird" is the only word I can think of at this moment.

zero_k•15m ago

I am happy they demonstrated how useful these devices are. Marking these as "disposable" is a kind of insanity. I recovered a few of them "disposed" (i.e. "randomly thrown away into") in an empty flower pot, and took out the LiPo batteries from them -- which are rechargeable, and have charge circuitry (non-trivial for LiPos). That we somehow decided that it's OK to design these to be used only once feels wrong.

This is the opposite of repairability. We specifically made them impossible to reuse and refill. Makes my tinkerer (and eco-friendly) heart very sad.

cluckindan•3m ago

There are reusable vapes and reputable stores carry only those, but they are generally many times more expensive than disposable vapes, which are favored by smugglers (profit margins) and underage users (price point and potential seizing by parent/teacher/police).

Disposable vapes put young people in contact with career criminals and organized crime, who will be only too happy to oblige even if the customer has no money. The result is young people in debt to criminals, which has the exact same ramifications as getting in drug debt. Those young people can then be coerced to commit other crimes to cover their debts.

SXX•7m ago

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_dongles_...

https://github.com/OpenStick/OpenStick

So yeah if you looking for hardware platform for weird homelab projects that's can be it.

kpil•7m ago

This is like a really really fast VIC 20!

BruceEel•5m ago

This is quite amazing. Dumb question: is there a way to run it in QEMU?

daft_pink•3m ago

I’m not vaping mom, It’s my webserver.

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