Talking of cheap and powerful devices one can also look at Chinese UZ801 4G LTE (Qualcomm MSM8916) dongles. They cost like only $4-5 and pack quite impressive HW: 4GB eMMC, 512MB RAM, actual 4G modem sometimes with 2 sim switching support. Since it's actually old Android SOC there is even GPU and GPS in there. And a lot of work was already done on supporting them:<p><a href="https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Zhihe_series_LTE_dongles_(generic-zhihe)" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Zhihe_series_LTE_dongles_...</a><p><a href="https://github.com/OpenStick/OpenStick" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/OpenStick/OpenStick</a><p>So yeah if you looking for hardware platform for weird homelab projects that's can be it.

Re-using this sort of device is super cool. I can imagine a post-apocalyptic scenario where a city is run on a hodgepodge of random computing devices like this.<p>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.

The mismatch between the Ancient Specs of Yore is kind of interesting. The Commodore 64 had 64KB of RAM, but that RAM was attached to an 8-bit, 1MHz CPU. This thing has call it half the RAM of a Commodore 64, but it's attached to a 32-bit 24MHz CPU the 1980s could only dream of. And it's disposable in 2025. Pretty impressive in a weird way.

I am happy they demonstrated how useful these devices are. Marking these as "disposable" is a kind of insanity. I recovered a few of them "disposed" (i.e. "randomly thrown away into") in an empty flower pot, and took out the LiPo batteries from them -- which are rechargeable, and have charge circuitry (non-trivial for LiPos). That we somehow decided that it's OK to design these to be used only once feels wrong.<p>This is the opposite of repairability. We specifically made them impossible to reuse and refill. Makes my tinkerer (and eco-friendly) heart very sad.

<i>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”.</i><p>I thought the point of making them like this was that they technically are reusable, so they can sell them (to people who <i>for some reason</i> keep buying them and throwing them away!) in places where disposable vapes are banned.

Disposable vapes are an abomination that somehow society has normalised.

Long live hacking! This is what Hacker News is all about. Great article and fun project!

The current state of technology is ... weird. From AI doing our art instead of our work, to hosting a website on an eCigarette. "Weird" is the only word I can think of at this moment.

This reminds me of when I was a kid, taking apart toys just to keep the tiny motors and circuit boards like treasures. Now as an adult, seeing someone pull a full working system out of a disposable vape to run a website feels like the same kind of magic. Maybe this is what romance looks like in the tech world.

We need to reduce microplastics.<p>Let's put microcontrollers into disposable vapes.<p>I don't know if I'm sad or happy.

Could one say that the author found the ultimate computing platform for running vaporware?

<i>This was my first time working with perl and I have to say, it’s quite well suited to this kind of task.</i><p>Nice to see Perl get positive press. Fun project, Bogdan!<p><a href="https://github.com/BogdanTheGeek/semihost-ip/blob/main/lib/uip/makefsdata" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/BogdanTheGeek/semihost-ip/blob/main/lib/u...</a>

I’m not vaping mom, It’s my webserver.

I always forget about the idea that IPv6 was intended to allow literally everything to have an address. The mouse, keyboard, display, etc. Seems like a bad idea now, but back then it was considered as part of the overall plan for the nearly infinite space. Maybe the joke is still missing a punchline. We've had this generic device interface for decades but decided on proprietary and arbitrary standards of device communication to make our lives easier in the short-term.

I am SHOCKED everytime I am reminded those Disposable Vapes exist.<p>My friend, that is a Portable Computer you are holding in Your Hands, and You are THROWING IT AWAY after ONE SINGLE USE?<p>Insane.<p>At least the fact that we got to this point in the first place is certainly an achievement for humanity as a whole?

Meta comment: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a HN thread with this ratio of upvotes to comments (8 vs. 251)<p>Disposable vapes are an extreme failure of legislation, but this is a cool hack nonetheless!

By law, neither electronics nor batteries can be disposed of with generic waste. This is the case in the EU, at least. So how are people then disposing these devices?<p>Disclaimer: I do know the answer, but I'd rather pretend that people actually follow the law.

Getting a 503 error now upon request to the vape hosted blog. Safe to say that it got <i>smoked</i> by the hacker news traffic volume!

"pacifiers for adults" is probably the best description for a vape that I have ever read.

I see that as of the time of this comment, he hasn't run Doom on it.<p>Yet?

So the EEs are right. Electrical circuits run on magic smoke.

This is why I come to HackerNews. This made my day.

I used to see disposable vapes dumped on the street until they were banned (thankfully). All those wasted batteries and microcontrollers is really wasteful.

This is really impressive. I laughed when I got 503 Unavailable on the hosted URL. I guess we're all hugging that little vape CPU a little too hard. :)

That's gotta be between 75 and 90% less damaging to humanity than the designed use of a disposable vape. Well done, Bogdan!<p>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. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio</a>

so I had to throw nginx in front of it so my little router wouldn't explode, but I hope some people will get to experience the <i>relaxing</i> loading experience live.

So a question maybe someone can clue me in on here: while the specs on that MCU seem imminently reasonable to me (especially compared to some of the PIC12F and similar I've used in the past) the thing that feels odd is the high clock speed ARM core. Is it really that cheap and easy to drop an M0 core or ip block into an MCU? Why not more RAM and a simpler/slower core? The M0 feels grossly overkill.

> This may not come as a surprise, but Linux (and with some tweaking even macOS) supports SLIP.<p>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.

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Missed opportunity to put a 503:Vape Unavailable http error.

Took a few attempts (over a few hours) to get the vape hosted version to load... but it just worked and I felt soooo happy!<p>I wonder if you could use one vape as a load balancer, then have a few of them serving the content?

I never thought I'd see someone turn a vape into a web server. Totally absurd but also kind of brilliant. I probably won’t remember the technical details, but that ‘why not just try it’ attitude is seriously contagious.

You think a Cortex-M0+ in a disposable vape is wasteful, wait until you see the ones with colour touchscreens and Bluetooth radios. It's probably only a matter of time before they start running Android on them.

Want to fit a web server into a speck of dust? Check out smews ( <a href="https://github.com/2xs/smews" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/2xs/smews</a> ) it runs with just 8k of flash and 512 bytes of RAM, supports HTTP 1.1 over TCP/IP, SLIP or others, with both static and dynamic content (GET and POST) The code is 18 years old and hasn’t moved in 10, A sandbox for budding pentesters ;)

This is cool, but, man, I felt like such a pathetic excuse for a human being when, brutally craving nicotine, with my vape empty of the fruit-flavoured juice that I am literally addicted to like the stupid pathetic baby that I am, and stuck with the cravings because all the shops are closed until morning, and so, in need of a distraction, I opened Hacker News. FFS.<p>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.

We are truly living in the precursor to some cyberpunk fever dream with this. Give it a few years and we’ll be smokin’ grandma & grandpa’s uploads out of vapes.

I wonder how much cost would be added if they included a small usb storage drive in those things. You could incentivize non-disposal because people would have a million of those things.<p>It’s really hard to quite vaping btw.

True vaperware

living that cloud life

Nice. But ...<p>> Later modems used PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol)<p>PPP a (c)slip are not used by modems but by the computers whose serials are up and running. Even without modems.

very impressive, I wonder if it would run Collapse OS (<a href="https://collapseos.org/" rel="nofollow">https://collapseos.org/</a>)

I respect the point about not wanting to send the manufacturer any business, but I would <i>love</i> to know the brand so I'd know which ones to rescue if given the chance.

This is why I go to hackernews every day <3

It would be nice to pool ideeas for what they could be recycled into. Imagine the amount of automatic cat feeders the world could build with these.

I bought a few hundred Puyas for my lab as stock for projects. They are quite capable and very cheap uCs to have around.

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I don't understand the hardware setup. There is a usb-c port and they talk about usb serial devices which could be a usb to serial port, but what is after that? There are no pictures of it connected.

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Reality catching up with satire: <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=lE4UXdJSJM4&t=170s" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/watch?v=lE4UXdJSJM4&t=170s</a>

Has anyone done the joke about "next big cloud platform" yet?

Makes me start thinking of cool use cases like dropping pineapples all over the place or those GeoCaching things

This is quite amazing. Dumb question: is there a way to run it in QEMU?

Can someone please make a zyn tin container for these?

I found of these that had a built-in retro game console with screen. Like, the kind of little game that a small child would be interested in. So frustrating.

But the essential resources for website hosting are public IP address and link bandwidth. Not a tiny computer.

As of this moment, this article has 420 comments which seems fitting.<p>I guess until now, mine may be the 421st.

Your GitHub link in the doc gives me a 404. Otherwise, good stuff!

Wow, it even survived the HN hug of death.

Hei ; Preact would be deff appropriate in that scenario ; it's a clone of react that is meant to be small !<p>Very inspiring work btw !

What were you doing to get traffic from the open Internet to your webserver at home? I always felt that was a risky proposition, but I might just be stupid.

At this point, is there any device left we could not make a web server yet?

Any lucky ones? I got only 504-s.

Appcolypse plan: Ammo? Canned food? Fresh water? No.<p>1,200 geek bars in a faraday cage.

How does the device compare to the computer we used to put a man on the moon?

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It's all fun and games to host a blog, but Ukrainian home garage drone manufacturers actually defend territory with these kinds of projects.

It's down. =(

Very appropriate to host “Suck it, Jin-Yang!”

The vape is 503

This is like a really really fast VIC 20!

Time for the disposable vape web farm

And its faster than Vercel!

Anyone got an RSS for this blog?

504 timeout -- fug of breath

but will it run Doom? :)

but why? i upload my website to cloudflare pages.

** yeah

VaPS

this is fun af

interesting

Now make a cluster of them running on load balancer

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