Hosting a website on a disposable vape
bogdanthegeek.github.io
bogdanthegeek.github.io
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.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/09/rpi_maker_in_residenc...
On this note, anyone got a tut or links to where I can get an appropriate charge controller/BMS (UK) to do this?
Like the post's author, I've been collecting vape batteries for a while and would love to build a power bank or use them in some IoT projects.
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/03/hackable-20-modem-combines-l... (search for Alibaba/Aliexpress/Amazon)
Before stumbling on this link I actually found one that mentions a MSM8916 in the description (it even has a screen, sadly no RAM information):
The only couple issues I had getting a plain old Linux on it from the instructions was that it didn't like the image buddy prepared custom for his tutorial in [0]. The solution was to follow the source links in the article, and flash it with a "generic" image from the person I believe originally got Linux working on these types of devices. I can't overstate how good these instructions and discussions in the comments are. The other thing was the modem didn't work, but all that required was copying the files from the original modem partition on the device to /lib/firmware of the new Linux installation. Super straight forward.
Sadly the screen, while it did function with the stock firmware, doesn't work out of the box with the Linux I flashed to it. Digging around, I think I've determined it's a DSI display, with maybe some evidence of Linux showing its there, but the kernel I have wasn't compiled with any support to run it. I'm not knowledgeable at all in this space though so there's that.
It's a great device, all the same benefits of the dongles, but with a battery to boot. If only I knew how to get that screen to work.
Well hullo there, turns out that's my old mate, the Snapdragon 410! Quite an unexpected surprise!
And funnily in retrospect, my Moto G3 from 2015 (which I still occasionally use for whatsapp!) has the exact same processor, and turns out base android (7) is (un?)surprisingly efficient when you're not doing much! I totally believe you could get a lightweight linux distro going on; I'm more impressed by such an old (and mobile!) chipset still having some sort of vestigial support!
(Fun fact, iirc this was one of the first processors to get 64 bit support for android but motorola wasn't able to port it over in time for the launch. Hence it runs 32 bit android instead!)
And, that Snapdragon is 1.4 GHz, I think.
That's enough for a bare-bones WordPress installation.
My first laptop had a 100 MB had drive, 8 MB of RAM, and a 25 MHz processor, and I remember running a web server on it too, in addition to Windows 3.11 and word processors and other software. One of those dongles would have been godlike power back in those days.
I feel like somewhere along the way scripting got out of hand. Stuff like Wordpress is absurdly resource intensive.
a.) the world of electronics is moving too fast
b.) My lack of skills and time to build something really cool with something like this
A while ago i bought a licheerv nano (similar to luckfox pico or Milk-v duo) to build an open source iPod nano via usb-c audio Jack and the open source buildroot for the licheerv nano.
I did not find a suitable 2.4 inch or at least < 3"touch display that worked with the integrated MPI port.
With LVGL it should be doable to build a small portable audioplayer with acceptable features... But not for me :-)
Aliexpress has this as the best selling one though the chipset is not confirmed https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006924641101.html
Well I take my gamble, wait 2 weeks and see what I'll get
EDIT: According to this post[1] above, this listing[2] should be the real thing, as the red variant does say SSID 4G-UFI-XX under the cap.
[1] https://wvthoog.nl/openstick/ [2] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006860833351.html
As for the chip basically almost all USB+LTE+WIFI sticks on Chinese marketplaces using it. They all have slightly different way to get adb / edl and flash, but all seems somewhat open.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=motorola+moto+g&qid=1757978993&rn...
I chatter with a friend who works for this and bey built everything bespoke (tracking, temperature (good health indicator), steering (yes you can tell cows where to go), etc). My first question was - did you use some android platform?
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.
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!
I'm constantly struck at how bread (a pastry, say) in a plastic tray, wrapped in plastic, is so crazy to me. The effort and technology that went, and goes, into oil extraction and such - only to throw the packaging away immediately that I get home ... it's just so unsustainable.
I wonder when in the West we'll start mining rubbish dumps ('refuse sites' where household waste is buried)? Maybe we already have? I know in developing countries people spend their days manually picking over such places.
Never, because we have virtually unlimited space for landfills, and landfill tech has quietly been improving over the last few centuries, to the point that landfills are cheap, non-polluting, and entirely carbon neutral. Countries with less land mass (Europe et al) prefer incineration (mainly to save space, despite it being significantly worse for the environment and much more expensive (although with the newer energy reclamation efforts this is getting better)).
IMO it's not worth worrying about landfills too much. Household waste makes up about 3% of total landfill waste (when you add commercial/industrial/agricultural) in North America. You and your bun wrapper are truly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
Lots of people especially those generally "up north" undermine risks and therefore costs of food poisoning, but it's real. Haven't those people seen things growing molds?
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
The only environment-friendly solution is to forbid this product to exist in the first place.
The point is that, most likely, the controller existed before this vape. Buying an off the shelf part can be cheaper than trying to bring up some custom part, both in cost and possibly in overall resources.
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.
- humans are expensive.
- If you want a custom part, you will need specialized equipment to build that part.
- If you want a custom part, you will maybe need to transport that part all around the world, while the off-the-shelf components might already be available close to your assembly plant.
I'm still surprised to see the fancier LCDs used which range from 2x4cm - slim 1.5x3cm (Digiflower, Raz is super popular.) Most LCD vapes which range from $20-25 are starting to fall by the wayside for $13-15 vapes with simple SMD LED displays with color overlays, (Kadobar, Geek Bar, Cookies, North) easy to make 7-segments for battery/juice status. Some are elaborate with wraparound displays that I've mistaken for flexible OLED and are deceptively cheap.
In other words, it's a huge challenge, but 6502 is closer, in complexity, to the pen than to the, say, AMD Ryzen.
But the primary idea behind Collapse OS isn't to run from 6502 built from the ground up (although it partly is), but to run from frankenstein cobbled up machines made from scavenged parts.
Laws are not here to make money, they are here to decide what kind of society we want. If electronics is too cheap and it creates wastes, I'm of the opinion that we should make it illegal, period.
It's the exact opposite. Tobacco is so heavily regulated and taxed that these become profitable. If cigarettes were 3-4$ a pack (which they would be without sin taxes and regulatory overhead), the vape market would come down as well and there's no way these could be profitable. As it is, they retail around $20 and contain the same nicotine as multiple $10 packs of cigarettes.
5% is 50mg/1ml. A cigarette pack has about 25mg. A geek bar has 16ml of juice = 800mg of nicotine = 32 packs of cigarettes.
There are many possible ways to slice the economical cake.
It's not the opposite at all. Tobacco should disappear just as well.
I believe that we as a society don't want e-waste (at least I don't). And when the society does not want something profitable to be done, it sets regulations.
If it wasn't illegal to steal your neighbour's car and sell it, then it would be profitable. But we as a society don't want it to happen.
I am very strongly pro-vape more generally but disposable ones should absolutely be illegal. They only serve to a) make them more attractive to casual users (instead of people switching from tobacco) and b) generate waste. Zero benefit to society.
There was a time when people could argue "the upfront cost of a proper vape is a problem that could keep people from switching from cigarettes". That's no longer true, there are incredibly cheap and compact refillable vapes now. (Well, there kinda always were, but they used to be crap. No longer).
The solution here isn't reuse it's just to stop production of them completely.
And they all just go into a landfill without ever being recharged once. It really should be criminal.
https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/disposable-vape-ban-loo...
Resource extraction eventually fills all niches, for better or for worse.
> Dick writes of the IoT being a source of vast-artificial-living-systems functioning on collective compute.
If you have some old Samsung Galaxy Gio from 2011, it'll provide far more value by recycling it back to raw materials than it would if you'd somehow try to keep it usable in 2025.
The problem here is planned obsolescence in a product's design. That is what needs to be made illegal.
You mean like add the cost of a MRI to the price of a pack of cigarettes?
We rewarded the government that brought this plan in by replacing them with Doug Ford, the brother of the infamous late Toronto mayor Rob Ford who was a literal crack-smoking drunk.
They were also hindered by the public's perception of their performance in the matters of Ornge and Hydro One.
It seems strange to me to frame the results of that election as being a reward for re-internalizing the waste management costs of consumer products.
P.S. After I wrote that I looked at the Wikipedia page. Which helpfully reminded me that 1987 was 38 years ago :(
... for those of us old enough to even have a mental distinction between "the VIC-20 era" and the "Commodore 64" era rather than just being a smear of bittyboxes all equally uselessly small....
This is the opposite of repairability. We specifically made them impossible to reuse and refill. Makes my tinkerer (and eco-friendly) heart very sad.
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.
This feels like pure fearmongering, and it's not even believable when most people here grew up around cigarettes, dip, or vapes in secondary school throughout the decades, and the dynamic was never anything like what you’re describing. Nobody was getting shaken down for cigarette or vape debts by “organized crime.” It was usually just some older kid or significant other, ex-student, or friend with a hookup who’d buy a pack or device and resell at a small markup. Sometimes it was even just a straight favor.
Trying to paint disposable vapes as a gateway to mafia debt collection just doesn’t square with lived experience in the US. Plenty of us experimented with nicotine products when we were underage - or know someone who did, and while that had its own health and legal issues, coercion into crime to cover “nicotine debts” simply wasn’t part of it lol
--
More people get into organized crime from their local Wal-Mart denying their job application as their only realistic ways to make money from labor, than ever do from nicotine products
I can't fathom why disposables are legal. Really believed that the post-boomer generations actually gave a damn about waste.
do you have an idea where I can start doing shit like this??? not up to professional of course but as a hobby where I don't need to electrocute myself would be nice
That we somehow decided that it's OK to design these to be used only once feels wrong.
But clearly they can be reused, so maybe it's better that they be thrown away by the unknowing, giving those who do know a source of cheap (as in free) electronics?
I thought the point of making them like this was that they technically are reusable, so they can sell them (to people who for some reason keep buying them and throwing them away!) in places where disposable vapes are banned.
But now every week we have more and more reusable bags that we can't find any use for, so we recycle a bunch each quarter. (And even that is questionable, when they are covered in impossible-to-remove stickers.)
One the liquid is low enough, the coil will burn a bit, and the whole thing should be disposed of.
One shop near me would take used ones and send them off to be properly taken apart and what not, but most people just toss them I suspect.
I am constantly walking past disposable vapes in the street, with their LEDs still shining.
I don't know why people dispose of the whole thing rather than just changing the pod, but at least it's a boon for electronics hobbyists.
I would be more fine with disposable vapes like this if almost all of them were recovered somehow, for the amount it subsidises production of Li-ion batteries.
There are two known culprits: diacetyl is/was used in some flavorings for its buttery taste, and liquid Vitamin E oil was used in clandestinely produced THC vape cartridges (which are really not relevant for the topic at hand). Both of those have largely disappeared from the market.
Sure, some cheap components can in theory leach heavy metals into liquids. The amounts are insignificant compared to what you will be breathing in just by walking on city streets, even outside rush hour.
And at least vapes don’t contain polonium-210 like cigarettes do.
Let's put microcontrollers into disposable vapes.
I don't know if I'm sad or happy.
I think the bigger SOIC chip is probably the battery charge IC. And then maybe a gram or two of PCB epoxy. And the plastic in the battery pouch and membranes which you need anyway.
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.
It feels mad and somehow wasteful that you can get a CPU at that price point, but the die itself is a tiny sliver of silicon. You can even embed an (even tinier) and weedier application-specific) IC in a paper metro ticket. Compute is just so ridiculously cheap that you can have a hundred of functional ICs for the cost of a single largish cup of hot bean water.
All for a device to help you develop health problems.
It is indisputable that anyone switching cigarette smoking to vaping is making a healthier choice.
My friend, that is a Portable Computer you are holding in Your Hands, and You are THROWING IT AWAY after ONE SINGLE USE?
Insane.
At least the fact that we got to this point in the first place is certainly an achievement for humanity as a whole?
Nice to see Perl get positive press. Fun project, Bogdan!
https://github.com/BogdanTheGeek/semihost-ip/blob/main/lib/u...
Disclaimer: I do know the answer, but I'd rather pretend that people actually follow the law.
Disposable vapes are an extreme failure of legislation, but this is a cool hack nonetheless!
Yet?
You can play Doom on an Atari 2600: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/323152-doom-the-2600-demak...
Just need to outboard a little extra RAM.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of them…
And now you can spin that shit up for pennies an hour and then throw it all away when you are done.
Who would have seen that coming back in, what, 1998…
I wonder if you could use one vape as a load balancer, then have a few of them serving the content?
It’s really hard to quite vaping btw.
They put addictive stuff in vapes, because of course they do.
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.
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.
With the disposable it would always be a gamble how long they would last. I don't get how people manage. Do they buy multiples at once and carry them around?
It was so much more convenient to carry that small bottle of liquid with me and have the peace of mind that I wouldn't run out of juice for the night. Never had issues with spilled liquid.
Not having a standard for pods sucks but you don't need to buy them that often. I just ordered them online anyway.
Of course it might be a bit of a cultural difference as well. Most of my smoker friends roll their own cigarettes which is way more inconvenient.
Don't think Apple would go there, but who knows....
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
The latest and fastest GPUs might be a marvel of technology, but so is the tech that let's us make and esp32 for almost nothing
(and it was slooooow and ugly!)
Sometimes the only option is to laugh at your own expense! Clearly this is a sign. I should buy more juice next time. And maybe start smoking more actual cigs.
I might quit, I guess, when my fiancee has to for pregnancy, should it eventually stop being funny to tell her how wonderful each individual cigarette I smoke is. But I really, really love smoking - more than any of my other hobbies, wholesome or otherwise.
I'm sure that'll change, and I'll look that book up if and when it does. Thanks again.
I've been (I am?) addicted to many substances, from fruit-flavoured nicotine juice through to heroin.
I find self-deprecating humour useful, personally. It helps me not wallow, to take the cravings less seriously. I of course wouldn't say the same about anyone who isn't me.
Because, as you say, someone who has an addiction isn't lesser than anyone else. It's a state of being that requires an awful lot of strength.
That said, having to use that strength on 'mango e-liquid' is, I think, funny in an absurdist way. We live in strange times!
Anyone have any experience with SLIP for macOS? Curious if the author was actually able to make that work, I’ve been looking into something similar the past few weeks with no luck.
(If I understood the author correctly, y'know, not to speak for them)
With your example, why would the author care whether some random person buys the vape he mentioned in his article? I don't see the point
> Later modems used PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol)
PPP a (c)slip are not used by modems but by the computers whose serials are up and running. Even without modems.
The actual web services behind the proxy run in their own containers and with proper isolation and firewall rules the effects of a security compromise are limited. At most an attacker will be able to take over the containers with an exploit (and they could do that with a VPS as well) but they won't be able to access the rest of the network or my secure internal systems.
If I was this guy and wanted to let people connect directly to my vapeserver I would simply host it on another vlan and port forward the HTTP connection. Even if someone manages to take over such an obscure system they're not going to be able to do much.
Why do you think it’s risky? Maybe we can talk about ways of securing it.
Like any server, it’s as safe as the server software (and its configuration).
The main thing is that, if someone gets onto the server system, then they're in my network and they can do attacks on other devices in that LAN (guest wifis are a nice way to isolate that nowadays; that didn't exist back when I started). Same as when I take my laptop to school for example, then others can reach it. I've had issues with others in school doing attacks because the internet was unencrypted http back then (client-side hashing in JavaScript limited the impact though), but not from anyone who tried to hack into the server. Only automated scans for outdated Wordpress, setup files for Phpmyadmin, ssh password guessing... the things they simply try blindly on every IP address. If any of this is successful, you're most likely going to be turned into a spam-sending server or a DDoS zombie; not something with lasting impact once you discover the issue and remove the malware
Most attackers don't do targeted attacks on your system or network unless you're a commercial entity that presumably can pay a nice ransom, or are a high-profile individual. Attackers aiming for consumers send phishing emails and create phishing advertisements, look for standard password vaults if you run their malware, try using stolen credentials on Steam and hope you've got a payment method stored... the usual old things. Having a server doesn't make any of those attacks easier, and besides, self hosting is very uncommon. Even if you and I had a similar enough setup at home with a straightforward path to exploitation, it's a few thousand people that self-host in a country with millions of people. It's not worth developing attacks for
How times change.
Once nearly every self respecting IT pro ran servers from there home network. The modern drive to outsource and consolidate the interweb to a handful of big players I find rather odd; perhaps even counterproductive in the long run.
Very inspiring work btw !
Seriously nice project!
These chips are more powerful than some µC I used for medical applications just a few years ago...
I guess until now, mine may be the 421st.
1,200 geek bars in a faraday cage.