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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

and a nuclear battery to last decades. oh, and stagnant software that doesn't get updates meant to work for other hardware

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The average vape has more processing power than Voyager, and the iPhone is orders of magnitude more complex. With that said, it takes skilled engineers to squeeze perfectly crafted code into such a tiny platform from the 70s.

I understand what you're getting at, but the 'average' vape pen is essentially a disposable battery and temperature sensor with no additional inputs or features.

After reading some details about the Voyager, I have my doubts that a disposable vape has more computation power [1]. Maybe the higher end devices with programable displays and temperature settings?

[1] https://www.eejournal.com/article/voyagers-1-and-2-take-embe...

A Pinecil (digital soldering pen) is probably a better example. BL706 MCU, "a low-power, high-performance IoT chip that supports BLE/Zigbee wireless networking, ... BL702 has built-in RISC-V 32-bit single-core processor with FPU, the clock frequency can reach 144MHz, has 132KB RAM / 192KB ROM / 1Kb eFuse storage resources, supports external Flash, and optional embedded pSRAM."

The Voyager had a custom-designed processor (well, several) that were basically computers made out of basic logic chips (74xx series); see details here https://www.eejournal.com/article/voyagers-1-and-2-take-embe...

Either way, it's clear that we (well, JPL) can build extremely powerful and sophisticated systems with relatively small computers, suggesting that resource constraints can sometimes be a source of stability and creativity.

>The Voyager had a custom-designed processor (well, several) that were basically computers made out of basic logic chips (74xx series);

This was not unusual at the time: many early arcade games were made exactly the same way. They've even been emulated by the MAME project.

yep, I had fun watching the Ben Eater videos where he builds a retrocomputer out of them. I even bought some of the chips to build a simple 4-bit counter with up/down buttons. It was a real revelation to understand that concept, and I ended up looking at an Apple I motherboard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I#/media/File:CopsonAppl...) and noticed the regular array of 74xx chips connected by some elegantly laid-out wires.

New vapes have Bluetooth on a small chip that tracks # of puffs remaining. Being sold for $40 bucks a at store.

Crazy that we have disposable one use electronics now.

Well it IS crazy.

This silicon and lithium could be used for much much better things and recycled as well, than a few puffs of a substance only meant to make people addicted.

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