11 ms·
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
by GeertB 9mo ago
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!
- uxhacker 9mo agoThe idea that people are smoking arm chips makes me laugh.
- truekonrads 9mo agoTechnical Boy's vape is here: https://giphy.com/gifs/americangods-vape-american-gods-26BGNgZFCBtWpaIHC https://giphy.com/gifs/americangods-vape-american-gods-26BGN...
- lazystar 9mo agoThis is your brain. This is your brain on ARM.
- thebruce87m 9mo agoNot smoking, vaping - better for your health but not RISC free.
- bigfishrunning 9mo agoHey man, RISC architecture is gonna change everything
- kolanos 9mo agoRISC is good.
- mosquitobiten 9mo agoit's literal vaporware
- tombert 9mo agoWhat a world we live in; we have gotten to a point where computers are so small and cheap that they can literally be “disposable”. It’s beautiful, I love it.
- rob74 9mo agoFor my part, I hate anything explicitly labeled "disposable". As the author writes, you're supposed to recycle it, but how many people will do that if it has "disposable" written on it? Even worse, if it was truly disposable they could use a non-rechargeable battery, but because they have to keep up the pretense of it being reusable, they have to include a rechargeable battery with more dodgy chemistry that probably shouldn't end up in a landfill...
- adrianN 9mo agoTo make matters worse, recycling is a scam (with a small handful of exceptions).
- stmL 9mo agoCan you elaborate on that? Edit: I'm actually curious l, i don't know how recycling supposed to work for electronics and how it can be a scam.
- mngnt 9mo agoThis youtube video explains why plastic recycling exists, how it's mostly ineffective and why is it a scam created to normalize one-use plastic. This basically applies to electronics and others. "Why would I reuse or reduce, I can buy, consume an recycle". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g
- pbhjpbhj 9mo agoTax CEOs of vape companies the percentage of their vapes that their company doesn't physically retrieve from customers to be recycled ...
- SuperMouse 9mo agoI've bought hundreds of Puya's for my lab stock on LCSC. Neat little things!
- pjmlp 9mo agoWhich 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. Now that it is a pity that when people talk about saving the planet everyone keeps rushing to dispoable electronics, what serves me to go by bycicle to work, be vegetarian, recicle my garbage, if everyone is dumping tablets, phones and magnificient thin laptops into the ground, and vapes of course.
- pkolaczk 9mo ago> 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 number. The latency is so huge I initially thought the machine was broken. I guess it’s not the chip problem but terrible programming due to developers thinking they don’t need to care about performance because their chip runs in megahertz.
- pjmlp 9mo agoWhat can you expect, when people assume as normal shipping the browser alongside the "native" application, and scripting languages using an interpreter are used in production code? Maybe that ticket machine was coded in MicroPython. /s
- ninalanyon 9mo agoHow close are we to smart dust I wonder? How small can we make wireless communications?
- kvdveer 9mo ago> How close are we to smart dust I wonder? How small can we make wireless communications? There's two limiting factors for 'smart dust': power (batteries are the majority weight and volume of this vape), and antennae (minimum size determined by wavelength of carrier wave). I believe you can fit an NFC module in a 5x5mm package, but that does externalize the power supply.
- slow_typist 9mo agoRFID tags are powered wirelessly, one could imagine powering smaller particles when operating on higher frequencies (RFID is on 13.something MHz requiring relatively large coils). A directional antenna could send a pulsed beam to power a subset of the particles in the area and afterwards receive their signals.
- regularfry 9mo agoIt needs to be in the infrared spectrum at least to be useful for smart dust, otherwise the package size is still dominated by the size of the antenna. Even mm-wave radar is marginal here.
- volemo 9mo agoSo... smart dust powered by the sun? Cool!
- slow_typist 9mo agoOkay if you take dust literally. The important part is that the particles fly. Like dandelion seeds.
- cruffle_duffle 9mo ago
- eru 9mo ago> [...] while the cost of the processor is 2 - 3 orders of magnitudes less. Is that inflation adjusted? If not, the real cost difference is even starker.
- torginus 9mo agoIt 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).
- londons_explore 9mo agoI 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 elements (Vegetable Glycerine boils at 290C, whereas Polyimide can do 400C for a short while). Construction of the whole device can then involve putting the PCB inside the injection moulding machine for the cavities, eliminating all assembly steps, joints and potential leaks, and reducing part count
- Aurornis 9mo ago> Vapes are probably made in enough quantity to warrant custom silicon Not when the MCUs might cost a penny and the other parts aren’t much more. Putting high power electronics and analog into the same custom silicon as a custom digital logic is nontrivial. They’re made on different processes.
- londons_explore 9mo agoBut you need very very little digital logic... The same kind of quantity to do the little power indicator LED's on a battery bank (which are charlieplexed btw), and thats done in the same ASIC that also has the 5V boost power supply (multi-amp gnd isolated n type mosfet) and charge circuitry involving voltage references and laser tuned comparators, and sometimes negotiates USB-C PD as well (needs an internal ROM). And the whole thing needs to be really cheap and with a standby current of uA's. As long as you aren't interested in multi-Mhz operation, combining the rest at very low cost isn't too tricky.
- PurpleRamen 9mo ago> 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! So, probably enough to land on the moon. And cheap enough to justify a dozen backups.
- wingtw 9mo agoidea for a hobby project for someone better versed in hw than me - create a computer that can at least run basic with the MCU from the disposable vape.. :)
- dionys 9mo agofirst one to run doom on a vape would do great numbers on youtube
- azornathogron 9mo agoAlready been done.
- M95D 9mo agoLink?
- azornathogron 9mo agoLooks like I was probably wrong about this. There are a lot of "doom running on a vape" videos on YouTube - very easy to find, that's what search is for - but the best primary source I could find quickly actually has doom running separately and the vape just being used as a display. Search for something like "doom on Puya PY32" https://hackaday.com/2025/09/20/when-low-sram-keeps-the-doom-off-your-vape/ https://hackaday.com/2025/09/20/when-low-sram-keeps-the-doom... https://github.com/atc1441/Vape_DOOM_ScreenShare https://github.com/atc1441/Vape_DOOM_ScreenShare
- evandrofisico 9mo agoNot doom, but (sorta) a website https://hackaday.com/2025/09/15/hosting-a-website-on-a-disposable-vape/ https://hackaday.com/2025/09/15/hosting-a-website-on-a-dispo...
- rwmj 9mo agoThe Z80 didn't even do 8 bit add. The ALU operates in two 4 bit cycles. I am now wondering if it's possible to put a ZX81 emulator on one of these microcontrollers. It would need to emulate the Z80 but you've got plenty of spare cycles, and 3x the ROM and RAM of the original, so enough space for a small emulator!
- zoobab 9mo ago"Microcontrollers like the Puya PY32 Series (e.g., PY32C642, PY32F002/F030) can cost in the $0.02 - $0.05 range" LCSC says between 6 and 8 cents in volume: https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/C5292058.html https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/C5292058.html 500+ $ 0.0802 2,500+ $ 0.0727 5,000+ $ 0.0682"
- rm30 9mo agoNowsdays computers misguided us to think that we need to measure RAM in GB and storage in TB. There are a lot of "invisible" applications running on 8bit MCU (not ARM based and more modern than ZX80) and few kB of flash and a bunch of RAM (64 bytes in luxury models). In this context matter more the integrated peripherals like ADC, DAC, PWM, etc that simplify the complexity of board and reduce the total cost.
- jijijijij 9mo ago> What an amazing time we live in! I feel like, pioneers of the past would be rather disappointed with us. I mean, primarily we're not using this ridiculous power to solve actual problems, but to enslave one another in addiction, mindless consumption and manufactured consent to a lesser life. Almost 100 years later, now with computer enabled misinformation and agitation campaigns by tech oligarchs, a new fascism is on the rise and Alan Turing would be called an abomination, again.
- bartread 9mo agoThis is exactly it. The tech in these sorts of devices is way overpowered for what they are or need simply because it's a lot cheaper to do it that way than it would be to use more appropriately scaled computing power. Either the "more appropriate" components are no longer in production, or they are in production but are now considered somewhat niche and are only produced in volumes that make them considerably more expensive than the more advanced/powerful options. So you end up with something that could probably be coaxed into running DOOM at playable FPS (if it had enough RAM and a display) relegated to running a humble - and frankly objectionably wasteful (coupled with questionable health outcomes with long term use) - disposable vape.
- stonemetal12 9mo agoSomething I recently found out about ARM Cortex M0s, they are small enough and cheap enough that they get used in USB cables to handle protocol negotiation between devices. Given that the moon lander had a 1Mhz processor and 4kb of ram means we landed on the moon with the compute power of a Vape or USB cable. Wild times indeed.
- efields 9mo agoWow: the Sinclair ZX81 launched in the UK in 1981 for around £49.95 as a kit (£50) and £69.95 assembled, making it incredibly cheap, and later in the US as the Timex Sinclair 1000 for $99.95 (kit) or $149.95 (assembled) Cheap for a 1980s computer, now pennies. Wild.
- estimator7292 9mo agoFor the even cheaper e-cigarettes many vendors are producing dedicaded ASICS integrating heater control, pressure sensing, battery management, for as close to free as it gets. It's astonishing. It's all integrated on a tiny PCB mounted to the back of the microphone.
- heavenlyblue 9mo agoIt's a god damn vape, 3Kb of ram is already a massive overkill for the purpose.