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For a couple of years now, I have been collecting disposable vapes from friends and family. Initially, I only salvaged the batteries for “future” projects (It’s not hoarding, I promise), but recently, disposable vapes have gotten more advanced. I wouldn’t want to be the lawyer who one day will have to argue how a device with USB C and a rechargeable battery can be classified as “disposable”. Thankfully, I don’t plan on pursuing law anytime soon.
Last year, I was tearing apart some of these fancier pacifiers for adults when I noticed something that caught my eye, instead of the expected black blob of goo hiding some ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) I see a little integrated circuit inscribed “PUYA”. I don’t blame you if this name doesn’t excite you as much it does me, most people have never heard of them. They are most well known for their flash chips, but I first came across them after reading Jay Carlson’s blog post about the cheapest flash microcontroller you can buy. They are quite capable little ARM Cortex-M0+ micros.
Over the past year I have collected quite a few of these PY32 based vapes, all of them from different models of vape from the same manufacturer. It’s not my place to do free advertising for big tobacco, so I won’t mention the brand I got it from, but if anyone who worked on designing them reads this, thanks for labeling the debug pins!
Can anyone just list the vape model being used here?
Pretty sure the 3-4 people reading this Lemmy thread are safe from the horrors of tobacco propaganda.
Great article. It’s very interesting how much can be done with literal trash lol.
This is the coolest thing I’ve seen today. It’s crazy how much computing power goes into passing current through a heating element. This should all be done with just a potentiometer and a switch to the battery, if only to make it cheaper for the manufacturer.
I agreed with you at first, but now I think it’s a bit more difficult. I think, the chip is there to prevent overcharge, to adapt to changing battery characteristics as it degrades or heats up, preventing overheating, maybe more of the things I don’t know about
So while it would work with less tech, it would likely be not as long lived and as safe, imo
It can actually be even simpler than that. You don’t even need a potentiometer technically. That being said it’s not very safe this way. If something goes wrong with the coil there is almost no warning and nothing to stop catastrophic failure.
The vape version of the article returns a 503 for me, anyone else get it to load?
It does work for me every once in a while.
They need to build a… Vape farm
Cool. I feel like semihosting is almost cheating though.
