For these devices the microcontroller needs to be super cheap. Microcontrollers like the Puya PY32 Series (e.g., PY32C642, PY32F002/F030) can cost in the $0.02 - $0.05 range for the kind of many-million volumes applicable for disposable vapes. These are 32-bit ARM Cortex M0 MCUs, running at a 24 MHz clock or similar, some with 24 KB of ROM and maybe 3 KB of RAM!

To put into context: this is 3x the ROM/RAM of the ZX81 home computer of the early 1980s. The ARM M0 processor does full 32-bit multiplication in hardware, versus the Z80 that doesn't even offer an 8-bit multiply instruction. If we look at some BASIC code doing soft-float computation, as was most common at the time, the execution speed is about 3 orders of magnitude faster, while the cost of the processor is 2 - 3 orders of magnitudes less. What an amazing time we live in!

Many countries have deposits for single use bottles/cans but an electronic device with a lipo battery is seen as perfectly fine to throw away.

These things should have 100 times the deposit amount of a can of soda with mandatory requirements for retailers to take the 'empties' back.

"I Powered My House Using 500 Disposable vapes" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy-wFixuRVU

Running a web server off a disposable vape: https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/

Our whole current civilization could be construed as advanced alien tech servicing a humongous tribe of moronic apes. The fact that one fifth of the internet is dedicated to porn just speaks for itself. Just thinking about all the tech involved, from the capturing of footage using highly sophisticated camera, to the transmission over kilometers of fiber optics, to the stokage into redundant and consistent databases backed by highly optimized hardware and brilliantly engineered file format, to the distribution to your phone device, which is literally a personal computer that fits in your palm.. all of that just to show porn to satisfy your monkey brain.

It seems almost absurd to what length humanity has gone just to satisfy it's primitive needs.

A lovely video from a Shenzhen factory, mass producing disposable vapes, in case someone's interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WohEiRvn2Dg+

Most likely a promotional from the looks of it. I myself stumbled over it a about a year ago, when someone posted it on an IRC channel.

We really need to ban these things.

As a smoker who transitioned to vaping, I see immense health benefits.

My home country (India), and others (Singapore, others?) have outright banned all electronic cigarettes which is a regulation I hate. I acknowledge that vapes reduce barriers to entry to kids. This is partly solvable in countries with strong governance.

But disposables? Ban that shit

Currently working on a method to recycle / repurpose the li-ion cells obtained from the disposable vapes, trying to scale up the recycling effort by releasing products to fund the manpower required to breakdown and sort the vape components . Getting close to releasing the first 100 demo models of the product for stress testing in the wild. Currently based in the greater Seattle area and here is a link to my site if anyone wanted to know more: https://2ndchancemnd.com/

This shouldn't be surprising since a vape is a safety critical device. Primarily because the temperature control has to be precise and you have to solve a surprisingly large number of control problems that can arise in real life. For instance, if you overshoot the temperature the amount of toxic by-products can increase sharply. You can also cause parts of the vape to disintegrate, and then aspirate things you really do not want in your lungs.

And this is before we get into dealing with the battery -- which has its own set of risks.

(One of the early sources of funding for MyNewt development was a company that made vapes. Though not disposable ones if I remember correctly).

Also, the MCUs they use are very cheap. They are cheaper than having lots of specialized discrete electronics.

I don't smoke/vape, but I saw some pretty absurd models available recently that really piqued my interest. One had a touchscreen, could run some basic apps, and had wifi/bluetooth support. The other had a d-pad + buttons built in and a few ripoffs of classic games you could play. I bought one of each to start ripping them apart on my work bench and playing with the firmware. Unfortunately I got busy and haven't done much more than look at the internals. They're using some sort of cheap smart watch SoC. It's wild you can get a battery, touchscreen, charging circuit, and a microprocessor for like $12.

I've just started a Salvage Pile in my workshop. Laser printer with fax modem was the first for excision and harvest. I could feel the addiction take hold before the last of the plastic shell was tossed into the refuse bin. The stepper motors alone!

I have a huge old microwave on the blocks next. After that a series of small odd ball electronic toys and a few early LED bulbs. If I ever come across a vape, I'm sure it'll make its way on to the shelf.

Some of the COVID test kits that were popular a few years ago(!) were even more complex.

"One man's trash is another man's treasure."

I still think the next evolution of these vapes is for a Tamagotchi-esque device to get built into them and to have the pet grow when you inhale through it. You're already walking around with enough tech - why not gamify it more?

I promise to cry if a docker container is found in there.

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

The ESP32 (with Bluetooth and WiFi) is like $5 on AMZN. Which is probably sub-$2 in any meaningful quantity in Shenzhen. We've been living, at least until the tariffs, in a StarTrek like world where whatever we want is available from Shenzhen for a ridiculously low price (which in many respects is better than "free" because "free" brings with it its own humongous problems).

I'm amazed there isn't more of an outcry against these things. I'm not an environmental activist, but even I'd feel wrong just throwing something like that away.

In 40 more years I wonder what the equivalent of "same specs in a disposable vape as home computer from 80's" will be

Someone reversed a vape that contains a Puya Microcontroller. https://github.com/grahamwhaley/py32c642_vape

In the 70s, the Polaroid SX-70 camera included a disposable battery in every film pack. After 10 shots, you threw away both it and the plastic film case with its large metal spring mechanism. When the film production stopped in the late 00s, you could use 600 film designed for other polaroid bodies reloaded into a 779 native SX70 cartridge, because the battery would last much longer than the initial 10 shots.

It feels like we’ve turned every physical object into a distributed system with firmware updates, a network stack, and a failure mode that requires rebooting your house. All that compute just to do the same job the purely mechanical version did for decades, except now it can also crash.

Is this actually disposable if it has the rechargeable battery and display? Or is it maybe like a lighter that technically can be refilled but nobody ever does?

It's so curious why these things are addictive. Before I tried a vape (it was called an e-cigarette back then) I thought the addictive thing about cigarettes is the nicotine. That's part of it, but a huge part (possibly even bigger) is just the sensation of sucking in smoke/vapour from a little stick and exhaling it. Is it similar to sucking on a mother's teat or something? It really seems to satisfy in a way nothing else does.

In the UK truly disposable vapes are banned, thankfully, but I do wonder if it's now just "technically refillable" ones that people use one time. They should be taxed to the eyeballs to encourage reuse if so.

I remember the good old days when a "vape" was just a sturdy housing for a rechargable battery, some heating wire, cotton and juice. The power was determined by the resistance of the coils you built. Those things would last forever.

Hosting A Website On A Disposable Vape

https://hackaday.com/2025/09/15/hosting-a-website-on-a-dispo...

It being activated by microphones makes me think you could add speakers to this tiny format and make a tiny digital instrument that's influenced by blow intensity etc.

It's wild to think about the e-waste implications of this. We are effectively throwing away a basic smartphone's worth of complexity and lithium every week.

I've seen some cool server projects running off these.

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

Is this the "John Graham-Cumming", ex-CTO of cloudflare?

These products are targeted towards high school teens and middle schoolers, carry a number of serious health risks, and anyone involved in making them can rot in hell.

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...)

This is a really interesting topic but not a thorough article imo. I don't really understand how the 6 flavours come about, what the sucking positions the author mentions are etc. Would love it if you go into more detail. Also, now I have a very strong urge to buy one of these things and take it apart. Inspirational!

Reminds me of a website that's hosted on a disposable vape: https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/

It feels so odd to think that the human which is self poisoning with an electronic device that will be neglectedly thrown on public area is not that different from the one who would diligently bring it to a trash, even curiosity didn't jump in to enjoy analysis of the device.

I just dont understand disposable vape. It's very easy to convert one into "reuseable": Add a charging port, a cheap li-po charger ic, some mechanism to let user refill the boiler. Disposeable vape should have not existed at first place

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A few years ago I saw a vape with a full display that played a pac man clone aside from the state and settings, and now I have a drawer of random vape screens and components that I swear i'm going to use one of these years.

I have used these disposable vapes before, and it saddens me that so much tech (including those batteries!) are just thrown away. Like what ever happened to reducing e-waste.

That is a lot! But that's also an expensive vape, with way more tech than cheap ones. Here you can get one for ~10 Euro, and they are NOT rechargeable or anything.

After-school tech club idea: instead of just handing kids an Arduino, tell them to get their purloined vapes out of their pockets and hack 'em till you get JTAG or semixosting working.

Disposable vapes waste have big environmental impact.

Use regular vapes with e-juice

I found a discarded working vape that had a complete working game system (screen with controls) built-in... a very attractive package to small kids.

Doesn't look like SMD was great. This looks like lowest cost has gone back to .. rows of people with a soldering iron patching the cheapest possible flow process.

It's beyond ridiculous, it's rechargeable but not refillable. As if a silicon tap was more difficult to design than a USB charging port.

Can it run Doom?

Also, it's fun to imagine someone building whole racks of these (e.g. recycled ones) for a computation farm. Or a cheap home server, whatever.

Does anyone remember when e-cigarettes first came out and they were intended to be a stop smoking aid? That didn’t last long!

Slightly deranged but serious question: what vape would be the easiest to convert/Frankenstein it into a Meshtastic node?

I can't believe this things even have microphones in them! That's a crazy amount of tech just to end up as e-waste.

And they have little displays on them, OLED displays which show the battery life and remaining fluid.

There’s more computing power in a disposable vape than in the Apollo Guidance Computer???

See also

Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45252817

Amazing that they use a microphone array to sense the position of the suction.

Put it this way, from engineering and technology perpective vape is equivalent to generalization of smoking tools (cigarette, pipe, etc). Naturally it's a very complex as a system and no small feat because you are going to generalize relativity and AI, for examples general relativity and AGI, respectively.

So who is going to make some mesh firmware for these and all other garbage computers?

I haven't seen one in years, are they still legal?

this is a minor reason I like disposable vapes - have seen myself teenagers tinkering with them. has potential to teach a lot

What a waste of precious resources

Alternate take: Is this really "a ridiculous amount of tech", or just "how things are today"?

At one point in history aluminum and other alloys were considered pretty cutting edge. As was in-house electricity and plumbing. Now, those things are just everyday stuff that gets no special regard.

When you can build disposable computers at scale for pennies, it might not be "tech" anymore in the sense of cutting edge things, and instead it's just "an average Tuesday".

I knew it was vapor ware.

Cyberpunk is real.

Can it run doom?

Such terrible waste of technology and environmental resources. Gotta be a better way. Maybe no vaping and some sort of paper patches instead?

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It's hard to take these vape teardowns seriously when they call Propyleenglycol, nictotine salts, and flavors "poison".

It's truly a marvel of anti-scientific thinking.

There's a ridiculous amount of tech in the DNA and cellular machinery of a single bacterium.

It's not rediculous if you look at this through a modern lens. In reality this tech is cheap. Trying to keep it around is hoarder mentality. You are stockpiling garbage which can be cheaply replaced.