Screens, Battery Packs, and Webservers: The Total Hackability of Vape Pens

If you’re looking for the perfect example of the utterly wasteful state of disposable electronics, you won’t find a much better one than a vape. Not all vapes are disposable (some can be loaded up with replacement liquid cartridges) but that doesn’t mean you won’t find them littering parks and streets. The bad news is that these little devices are full of unnecessary e-waste. The good news is that if you find one, you have a teeny computer complete with battery, display, USB-C port, and even pressure/flow sensors.

What’s in a Vape?

Throwing a cigarette butt on the ground is irresponsible. The plastic filter isn’t going to biodegrade, and it’s gross and disrespectful of other citizens (especially those tasked to clean our streets). But dropping a vape is a whole other story. It contains a li-ion battery, which if nothing else is going to pollute whatever ground or waterway it ends up in. Then there are circuit boards and screens, which can leach lead, chromium, nickel, and zinc.

And these things are meant to be thrown out. They’re actually marketed as being disposable; it’s often even in the name. In the case of vapes, even the disposable ones have USB-C ports. Even though the liquid chamber is single-use, and cannot be swapped, the device will need recharging to vaporize all that liquid. The alternative would be a bigger battery, which may actually be more harmful, and probably more expensive (and therefore less profitable) to make. 

But in hacking terms, all this tech makes for a rich resource.

When blogging hacker John Graham-Cumming found a Fizzy Max III 60K Rechargeable Disposable Vape discarded in the park, he did what any respectable nerd would do. He sanitized it, cracked it open, then blogged it. His post shows the crazy amount of tech inside, from the unnecessary display, to the 800 mAh lipo battery, to the USB-C charging port, to the two PCBs that control everything. 

This vape offers six different flavor combinations, and that’s where the three microphones come in, which may also be air-flow detectors. You rotate the mouthpiece to align it with the three different liquid chambers, and when you suck on it, those “microphones” help the unit to know which chambers to heat. Three of the flavors are pure single-chamber flavors, and three are two-chamber mixes. 

As an aside, vaping is absurdly uncool. Smoking is clearly very bad for you, but at least it doesn’t make you look like a total dork. And I say this as a lifelong nerd who grew up playing RuneQuest because AD&D was too basic, programming scientific calculators, and sniffing lead solder fumes at model-railway club meets. But you know what is cool? Getting a tiny computer for as little as $13.99 (the current sale price of the Fizzy Max III).

With all this in mind, anything you can do with a discarded vape is inevitably going to be cooler than sucking on one, so let’s take a look at some ideas.

Web Server

Take a look at this website, which is hosted on a disposable vape. A vape that contains an ARM Cortex-M0+ microcontroller, plus the now-familiar battery and USB-C port. Hacker Bogdan Ionescu created the project when he realized the vapes he was collecting just to harvest their batteries had started to contain useful computers. Here’s Bogdan’s list of its specs: 

• 24MHz Coretex M0+
• 24KiB of Flash Storage
• 3KiB of Static RAM
• a few peripherals, none of which we will use.

“You may look at those specs and think that it’s not much to work with. I don’t blame you, a 10-year old phone can barely load Google, and this is about 100x slower,” he writes. “I on the other hand see a blazingly fast web server.”

You can dig into Bogdan’s blog post for all the surprising details, but the gist is that pretty much any serial device (like USB) is capable of being configured as a modem. It’s a matter of optimizing the code, buffering and caching in the right places, and you have a web server that can load a full page in just 160ms. Not bad for a “disposable” computer.

Battery Pack

Perhaps a simpler project would be to collect the batteries from discarded vapes and put them to use.

Second Chance Material and Design has found a repeatable strategy here: They take discarded vapes, pull out the batteries, and slot them in 3D-printed arrays that fit the form factor of tool batteries, like Ryobi and Milwaukee batteries.

But you can do basically the same thing yourself at home.

That’s exactly what N-Ender_3 did, collecting up a handful of batteries from rechargeable vapes, soldering them into a circuit with a USB power bank charging module (for safe power management while charging), and slotting them neatly into a 3D-printed enclosure. 

In N-Ender_3’s setup, the batteries have to be charged individually before assembly, but after that you just charge it and use it like and other power bank. 

For a more in-depth explanation of reusing vape batteries, including the dangers, benefits, and tips on uses (they’re amazing for microcontroller projects, for example), check out Bekathwia’s Instructable’s post.

Screens

Jason Gin didn’t actually reuse a disposable vape screen in another project, nor did they install Windows 95 on a vape. But this post on their Rip it Apart blog is a must-read for anyone interested in electronics hacking. Which, if you’re reading this article, is you. 

Jason reversed-engineered the screen in a Kraze HD7K vape by searching for similarly-sized screens with matching pin-outs, and then used his rather neat DSLogic Plus logic analyzer to inspect network traffic while the vape was initializing the display. 

They didn’t use the display alone. Although that would be totally possible at this point, it’s not necessary. You can buy a vape screen for a buck or so, and you’ll end up with a bunch of waste you may not need.

Jason instead hacked the vape and installed a custom Windows 95 theme on there. Which is rad in its celebratory pointlessness. 

Synthesizer

A group of NYU interactive technology enthusiasts figured out that they could make use of vape low pressure sensors to turn them into digital ocarinas, Wired reported. “The noises that come out are, frankly, screechy and chaotic,” Boone Ashworth reports. But fun.

Technologists shuang cai, David Rios and Kari Love, known collectively as the Paper Bag Team, have released a full step-by-step guide for hacking a vape this way on Instructables.

Vapor Trail

As we have seen, vapes are just tiny computers hooked up to heating elements and some other electronics, depending on the complexity of the design. It would be very cool to actually hack an entire vape device to do something useful, seeing as how you’ve got a microcontroller, a screen, and a battery.

Here are a few ideas, which may or may not be possible, but which could be fun projects to try. If those air-flow sensors are indeed microphones, then the vape could become a tiny recording device, or at least a weird kind of mic array which could be used by experimental musicians. 

If they are in fact air-flow sensors then you’ve got the makings of a pressure-detecting intruder alarm that could maybe protect your packed lunch in the office refrigerator. 

I’m intrigued by those heating elements too. Could a vape be repurposed, almost without hacking, as an on-demand air-“freshener,” or perhaps to deliver a hit of essential oils into a room? You’d need some kind of dispersal mechanism like a fan, but you could totally power one of those USB fans from a bank of reused vape batteries. 

This is a neat reminder that electronic tech, however “disposable” it might be, is just as harvestable for parts as are simpler machines. I have a drawer full of bolts, springs, battery contacts, weirdly-sturdy packaging materials, and so on, ready for browsing when a project needs them. If I find a discarded vape, I’m definitely going to break it up for parts.