"it was actually a PY32F002B, powered by a 24 MHz Arm Cortex M0+ processor. The chip also carried 24KB of flash storage and 3KB of static RAM"
To process a single button.
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2026
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Because an existing SoC at scale is cheaper than a custom ASIC.
You see this all the time, custom keyboard running ARM+Linux, SmartNICs using RISC-V cores/FPGAs instead of ASIC accelerators. Even Microsoft refuses to commit to ASICs for network processing in their DCs and use FPGAs instead.
A vape is a battery connected to a button connected to a heating coil. You might want a single transistor. You don't need a software platform.
There is also a battery management system as well.
M0 processors are dirt cheap, especially in bulk.
They probably have a BMS library that takes a few Kb of flash.
The time it would take to make the design cost effective wouldn't be worth it.
Slap a less than a dollar mcu and be done with it.
Disclaimer: I don't smoke anything, so I don't know any details.
Wouldn't a button connected to a heating coil be a fire hazard? Is there no automatic shut-off based on temperature? If you add enough safety features, it might end up costing about the same as an embedded SoC.
All it would need is a thermal fuse/cutoff, like those in portable heating appliances (air fryers, grills etc.). I wonder what's needed to include a 10 second on & 30 seconds disabled timer, maybe it's cheaper
I wonder what’s needed to include a 10 second on & 30 seconds disabled timer, maybe it’s cheaper
555 timer and a transistor or two, I think?
They also do some BMS stuff, and some support limited graphics and UI. Depedns on the moddle
You don't need a CPU at all for this trash
OK, but can it run Doom?
I don't get those pieces of crap. There were these fancy electric cigarettes years ago, using those 3.7V rechargeable batteries. Custom designs (saw lightsaber designs), custom liquids, repairable, no e-waste. What is wrong with people to use those crapsticks? And why do those dumbnuts don't get that these things are e-waste not residual waste?
Ads and influencers pushing them.
In my mind, nothing with a circuit board is disposable. Pains me to see it.
This further illustrates how absolutely crazy it is to produce these devices for a single use and then just throw them away, not even making sure they can be recycled properly. It's complete madness. I hope they'll be banned soon, I think the EU is working on it.
The regulation provides that by 2027 portable batteries incorporated into appliances should be removable and replaceable by the end-user
Coming soon...
Disposable vapes are already forbidden, at least in France, idk if it is union wide.
But yeah, those things make no sense. The only thing with a battery that should be disposable would be fire alarm. Not because of tge battery, but because the main sensor has a 10 years lifespan due to its natural deterioration.
They should absolutely ban disposable but as long as they're smart about it and don't try and make it a general vape ban. Anything with a microcontroller and OLED display should need regulation to be "disposable". So fucking wasteful.
Vapes can and have always been something you can pop a battery and cartridge and custom juice in. There's zero reason to make it disposable. Make the coil/cotton/juice cartridge disposable... Like a juul was last I checked? That's reasonable.
And then next regulate how much nicotine can be in per ml. 60mg/ml is fucking insane. That is heart issue level of nicotine. I got buzzed off 12 mg/ml, used 3 or 6mg/ml regularly, and quit at 1.5mg/ml. There's no fucking reason other than harm and addiction to provide 60mg/ml.
don't try and make it a general vape ban. In some EU contries 10ml liquid costs more than pack of cigarettes, so they defacto banned vaping. how much nicotine can be in per ml. 60mg/ml 20 mg/ml is EU wide limit since 2025
OLED maybe but small micros are now so cheap and so small that they're negligible.
Battery is probably still the biggest environmental impact.
One of those 3 cent one time programmable microcontrollers would be sufficient. Something with enough power to run a web server is just wasteful.
You do realize that a 1 cent microcontroller has enough RAM, Flash and processing power to be a web server, correct?
Getting ever closer to smart dust.
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Interesting video about it
What is this Brodie guy's problem? Keeps calling it "dumb" and throwing shade for like 5 min before he actually gets on with what basically summarising the guys work.
Like no one is expecting a high functioning website to run off of a vape, chill dude.
why does a glorified heater connected to a battery need any silicon attached to it?
To control the amount of voltage used in making the heat and not immediately burst into flames, for one.
It is interesting to see old tech having clever solutions for stuff like this, these days the answer is 98% of the time is to slap a CPU on it.
It's boring!
Wait til you hear about all the different technologies we use to generate electricity
yep, that’s right - ~~it goes in the square hole~~ we’re boiling water!
99% spinning a generator and 1% direct solar panels
I am still giddy when I think about the way solar panels work. Still feels futuristic to me :3
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It's probably cheaper and simpler to modify (say you suddenly want it to turn on when you click 3 times) to use a 0.1€ chip than to figure out how to do it and build it with discrete components.
20 years ago I was all "computer (chips) can do everything! We can use them everywhere! Replaceable, reprogrammable, fantastic!"
And no one cared.
Now they are everywhere and it's just a fucking mess 😔
Maybe 20 years from now the EU will have forced standards onto everything and you can (again) fix your dishwasher (and start it from work!!1!).
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24 MHz Arm Cortex M0+ processor. The chip also carried 24KB of flash storage and 3KB of static RAM.
... a 10y old phone can barely load Google, and this is about 100x slower.
Wild that you can serve anything with that hardware. Granted, static websites are basically just sending files over the wire.
The 10 year old phone OS probably is slowing all of that. If they flashed phone as a dedicated webserver it would probably be fine
The webpage he hosted was a copy of his own blog post explaining the hack. It just about fit into the 20KB of available flash storage.
We can infer that on every request, the whole static page needs to be spooled out of flash onto RAM (in chunks no larger than 3k), then sent out over Ethernet.
That's an awful lot of work for the chip. I'm not surprised at all that it errors out under heavy load. The request queue probably grows until it collides with the buffer that bucket brigades the web page to the network.
I'm afraid to look up what optimizations were necessary to get that level of performance. It's damned impressive work.
Ah, but what if you string together 100 of these as a cluster? Now u get a whole 2Mb of flash storage!
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