Editor's take: Vapes aren't what they were a few years ago. Some now sport screens ranging from the basic – displaying charge and approximate puffs left – to elaborate LEDs showing brand logos with colorful RGB light shows. One scrap modder has shown that these tiny disposable computers can have a second life with some creative engineering.
In what might be the nerdiest twist on vaping yet, an engineer has turned a disposable vape into a fully functional web server. That's right: a device running on just 24 KB of flash and 3 KB of RAM – usually meant to track how many puffs are left – can now host a webpage. For context, that's not enough memory to store a single high-resolution selfie, yet somehow it can serve the very blog post describing it.
The mastermind behind this "vape-to-website" hack, Bogdan Ionescu, spent years collecting discarded vapes from friends and family. At first, it was just about salvaging the batteries, but curiosity – and a dash of borderline obsession – soon led to a more ambitious experiment: putting these tiny adult pacifiers online. In a way, it was a strange but impressive second life for a device most people would have thrown away.
The vape's built-in ARM Cortex-M0+ microcontroller, embedded within its Puya IC, was key to bringing it online. Using semihosting and a vintage protocol called SLIP, Ionescu coaxed the device into sending and receiving IP packets, effectively turning it into the tiniest dial-up modem you'll ever see. Performance was initially painfully slow: pages crawled, and pings took over a second.
"A 10-year-old phone can barely load Google, and this is about 100 times slower," the modder remarked.
After optimizing the data flow, managing RAM efficiently, and batching serial writes, the vape became "blazingly fast," Ionescu joked. It now loads a page in about 160 milliseconds with zero packet loss, a massive improvement over the 20-second load time he was tempted to leave because it was "so bad, it's actually funny."
For tech nerds, it's a feat of embedded engineering brilliance – squeezing a working web server into less memory than a digital watch. For everyone else, it's just plain hilarious. Imagine browsing a website hosted on something you normally inhale and toss in the trash.
The blog post dives even deeper into the microcontroller tricks, from flash memory quirks to a tiny JSON API that counts page requests. You don't need to be a coder to appreciate the absurdity. A disposable vape doubling as a web server isn't just recycling – it's the definition of cloud computing.
You can dive into all the technical nitty-gritty in Ionescu's blog post. If you want to try the vape server yourself, the link's in the write-up. We couldn't get it working – just a wall of 503 errors – but maybe you'll have better luck. One heads-up: it runs on plain old HTTP, not HTTPS, which makes sense given the limits of the throw-away server.
Image credit: EightVape, Bogdan Ionescu