I've found [1] to be the best guide for getting started with them; you need to make a copy of the firmware partitions that you re-flash after installing Linux onto it in order to get the 4G modem working. It's honestly absurd how much you're getting for a fiver with it; add a power bank (or make your own from scavenged vape batteries in the spirit of this post) and you have a full Linux machine with WiFi and 4G that can work almost anywhere.

[1] https://wvthoog.nl/openstick/

In case anyone wants a few links containing this SOC or similar, there's an entire article on Hackaday and a bunch of links shared in the comments:

https://hackaday.com/2022/08/03/hackable-20-modem-combines-l... (search for Alibaba/Aliexpress/Amazon)

Before stumbling on this link I actually found one that mentions a MSM8916 in the description (it even has a screen, sadly no RAM information):

https://aliexpress.com/item/1005007496178143.html

> Qualcomm MSM8916

Well hullo there, turns out that's my old mate, the Snapdragon 410! Quite an unexpected surprise!

And funnily in retrospect, my Moto G3 from 2015 (which I still occasionally use for whatsapp!) has the exact same processor, and turns out base android (7) is (un?)surprisingly efficient when you're not doing much! I totally believe you could get a lightweight linux distro going on; I'm more impressed by such an old (and mobile!) chipset still having some sort of vestigial support!

(Fun fact, iirc this was one of the first processors to get 64 bit support for android but motorola wasn't able to port it over in time for the launch. Hence it runs 32 bit android instead!)

> 4GB eMMC, 512MB RAM

And, that Snapdragon is 1.4 GHz, I think.

That's enough for a bare-bones WordPress installation.

My first laptop had a 100 MB had drive, 8 MB of RAM, and a 25 MHz processor, and I remember running a web server on it too, in addition to Windows 3.11 and word processors and other software. One of those dongles would have been godlike power back in those days.

I feel like somewhere along the way scripting got out of hand. Stuff like Wordpress is absurdly resource intensive.

My biggest Problem with these devices is

a.) the world of electronics is moving too fast

b.) My lack of skills and time to build something really cool with something like this

A while ago i bought a licheerv nano (similar to luckfox pico or Milk-v duo) to build an open source iPod nano via usb-c audio Jack and the open source buildroot for the licheerv nano.

I did not find a suitable 2.4 inch or at least < 3"touch display that worked with the integrated MPI port.

With LVGL it should be doable to build a small portable audioplayer with acceptable features... But not for me :-)

Where do you get them for $5? Cheapest I can find is around £8 (11 USD), and it’s not clear if they have this chip.

Speaking of cheap and powerful, I’m looking for a dirt cheap android phone that has a decent camera. I used to ship out GoPros to my customers but I don’t actually need them to film in 4K, 1080p with a decent CCD would be fine. And lately new GoPro models have become a pain to setup, they require pairing with a modern mobile phone which my customers sometimes don’t have.

Reminds me of the LTE dongles Freedom Pop would give out that were running Linux. If you took them apart you got UART access, too.

Where do i get a MSM8916 board for commercial usage at low volumes(1k)?

Now what I'd like to see is the other way around - you know, like the "old" UMTS sticks, just for 5G. No OS, especially not one so prone to all sorts of security like Android, just a pure baseband chip, some interface chip that talks USB3, two built-in antennas and the option to connect more powerful/higher directionality external antennas.

Do any of the modem bands work in America? If so... what carrier?

Another example: One-time covid tests with a microcontroller, optical sensor to read the result and bluetooth to connect to a phone to display the results. Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29698887

I've been aware about the perfectly reusable lithium batteries inside these disposable vapes, which is egregious enough.

But the one in the FTA comes with a full fat microcontroller and USB-C connector! I'm not clear if these connectors are accessible outside or if you need to break open the packaging before being able to get to it.

Like you said: "Many layers of stupid are present here"

All that hardware must surely be worth more than half the value of the actual product!

The fact that selling such a thing is profitable means that we lack regulations somewhere.

Makes me think of these:

https://duskos.org https://collapseos.org

Are they an egregious form of Ewaste really? (Serious question). Because there’s so much reusable hardware in so many of the other things we throw out (phones, cars, laptops, etc) but we don’t make reasonable efforts to limit that. I’d love if the vape hardware was standardized to a degree for cool reuse projects like this. Donate a bunch of used vapes as hardware platforms for school projects? Like arduinos…but not.

Disposable vapes were banned in the UK. Which in practise has meant that manufacturers have added the cheapest possible charging port which is non-standard so nobody can charge them and no way to open them to refill them.

https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/disposable-vape-ban-loo...

Will the Butlerian Jihad find all the vapes?

It's a shame negative externalities like this are basically impossible to include in the up-front price.

> "A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard."

> Dick writes of the IoT being a source of vast-artificial-living-systems functioning on collective compute.

I do wonder if there would be a workable law where companies are permanently responsible for what they produce, they must always accept back and responsibly recycle/break down to resources what they put out there, and do away with the shifting of responsibility of waste to society? Seems like a terrible engineering challenge but the right thing to do.

Hope you don't get caught in Luddic Path's space with your stash of contraband disposable vape

Its only got 3k of RAM, 24k of flash. Although modern flash is sometimes the same bandwidth as memory was if you go back a bit, although not latency of course.

It's got only 3KB of RAM, less than even the VIC-20.

The CPU isn't that fantastical for the 1980s. The Archimedes had an 8MHz ARM in 1987. It was expensive though and came with at least 512KB RAM.

P.S. After I wrote that I looked at the Wikipedia page. Which helpfully reminded me that 1987 was 38 years ago :(

"One man's trash is another man's treasure."

That we somehow decided that it's OK to design these to be used only once feels wrong.

But clearly they can be reused, so maybe it's better that they be thrown away by the unknowing, giving those who do know a source of cheap (as in free) electronics?

There are reusable vapes and reputable stores carry only those, but they are generally many times more expensive than disposable vapes, which are favored by smugglers (profit margins) and underage users (price point and potential seizing by parent/teacher/police).

Disposable vapes put young people in contact with career criminals and organized crime, who will be only too happy to oblige even if the customer has no money. The result is young people in debt to criminals, which has the exact same ramifications as getting in drug debt. Those young people can then be coerced to commit other crimes to cover their debts.

There's a pretty amazing video where a guy makes an entire functioning e-bike battery out of disposable vapes that he gathered around a music festival. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcVp9T8f_W4

I can't fathom why disposables are legal. Really believed that the post-boomer generations actually gave a damn about waste.

I'm confused by why anybody would buy one of these when entirely reusable versions exist, but then vaping seems unwise to me in general except as a way to quit tobacco.

Just like how places with bag bans often just end up with thicker plastic bags that can be sold for ten cents and claimed as “reusable.

Some have replaceable pods / tanks, but most have no user serviceable parts whatsoever.

One the liquid is low enough, the coil will burn a bit, and the whole thing should be disposed of.

One shop near me would take used ones and send them off to be properly taken apart and what not, but most people just toss them I suspect.

No, it’s there because the battery can’t hold enough charge for the ratio of vape liquid they put in it. So you get 2-3 full charges and it runs out of liquid.

Society tends to normalize things that have ad budgets.

Not to mention the EXTREME damage it can do to a person's lungs, and do this damage very quickly.

The micro in this thing is a WQFN-16 (W = very very thin, thinner than V for very) with 3x3x0.75mm body. That's around a fiftieth of a gram of plastic.

I think the bigger SOIC chip is probably the battery charge IC. And then maybe a gram or two of PCB epoxy. And the plastic in the battery pouch and membranes which you need anyway.

In terms of plastics waste volume, the casing and tank is probably nearly all of the content. So the problem is a disposable vape bring a thing at all, not really the microcontroller in there.

It feels mad and somehow wasteful that you can get a CPU at that price point, but the die itself is a tiny sliver of silicon. You can even embed an (even tinier) and weedier application-specific) IC in a paper metro ticket. Compute is just so ridiculously cheap that you can have a hundred of functional ICs for the cost of a single largish cup of hot bean water.

The vape comes with a miniature laser-engraved WEEE crossed-out trash can symbol so everything is fine.

Regarding the meta comment, it's due to comments being moved from a 4 hour older post into this brand new post by the mods (a bit strange).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45249287#45252845

3kb of RAM and 24kb of flash is a bit tight for Doom unfortunately. It has been ported to another Cortex-M0+ microcontroller, the RP2040, but that has 264kb of RAM plus megabytes of flash and the game still barely fits.

I see that as of the time of this comment, he hasn't run Doom on it.

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of them…

Or would it be the other way around?

It's on life support, only about 5% of the request get though, most html only. I've been babying it all day :)

No mas.

Apparently they're cheap because they're a flash memory company that bolts a little CPU onto their own flash, rather than a CPU company having to then buy the more expensive flash with a markup.

The HN way is to colocate a cluster of these and put them behind a F5

Quitting smoking was the best decision I made and I wish I did it earlier. If you feel ready Allen Carr's book worked for me. I wasted so much time smoking.

Having an addiction doesn't make anyone "a pathetic excuse for a human being"

What's insane is how cheap all those components are. A quadcore processor with ram and memory, WiFi and Bluetooth for pennies at wholesale.

The latest and fastest GPUs might be a marvel of technology, but so is the tech that let's us make and esp32 for almost nothing

how long til they have GPT-5 level LLMs?

Maybe, I'm not sure how you would connect a debugger to qemu, and you would have to emulate the ram and flash, but other than that is pretty standard arm cortex m0. The code is pretty generic too.

I am probably stupid so bear with me. I don't get the part about not naming brands if you are certain they won't ever sponsor you. I feel like it just hurts the value of the article with nothing gained

I've actually been trying to look into something similar? I have a pile of old vapes from friends/family I want to re-purpose, but don't really know where to start.

Running at 24 Mhz, the vape is umpteen times faster but interestingly enough the AGC had 36 KiB of ROM while the vape only has 24 KiB. Umpteen is a technical term denoting that a straight comparison isn't possible, as the Cortex M0 does more in a single clock cycle than the AGC does but they're also different architectures and the programs running are different.

Thank you, it's fixed now.

The magic smoke has escaped :)

The HackerNews hug of death

I've hosted at home for years and if you have it properly setup it's not any more risky than using a VPS. I have 443 open on my router and basically all web traffic is routed to a container on my server. The container is on an isolated vlan and basically runs nginx as a ssl reverse proxy.

The actual web services behind the proxy run in their own containers and with proper isolation and firewall rules the effects of a security compromise are limited. At most an attacker will be able to take over the containers with an exploit (and they could do that with a VPS as well) but they won't be able to access the rest of the network or my secure internal systems.

If I was this guy and wanted to let people connect directly to my vapeserver I would simply host it on another vlan and port forward the HTTP connection. Even if someone manages to take over such an obscure system they're not going to be able to do much.

Open a port or if their router supports it, assign their device to a DMZ.

Why do you think it’s risky? Maybe we can talk about ways of securing it.

Like any server, it’s as safe as the server software (and its configuration).

> What were you doing to get traffic from the open Internet to your webserver at home? I always felt that was a risky proposition,

How times change.

Once nearly every self respecting IT pro ran servers from there home network. The modern drive to outsource and consolidate the interweb to a handful of big players I find rather odd; perhaps even counterproductive in the long run.

Done it since before I properly knew what I was doing. Haven't had issues. Even though n=1, also now that I'm actually working in IT security, I don't think the risk was ever much bigger than what I could oversee

The main thing is that, if someone gets onto the server system, then they're in my network and they can do attacks on other devices in that LAN (guest wifis are a nice way to isolate that nowadays; that didn't exist back when I started). Same as when I take my laptop to school for example, then others can reach it. I've had issues with others in school doing attacks because the internet was unencrypted http back then (client-side hashing in JavaScript limited the impact though), but not from anyone who tried to hack into the server. Only automated scans for outdated Wordpress, setup files for Phpmyadmin, ssh password guessing... the things they simply try blindly on every IP address. If any of this is successful, you're most likely going to be turned into a spam-sending server or a DDoS zombie; not something with lasting impact once you discover the issue and remove the malware

Most attackers don't do targeted attacks on your system or network unless you're a commercial entity that presumably can pay a nice ransom, or are a high-profile individual. Attackers aiming for consumers send phishing emails and create phishing advertisements, look for standard password vaults if you run their malware, try using stolen credentials on Steam and hope you've got a payment method stored... the usual old things. Having a server doesn't make any of those attacks easier, and besides, self hosting is very uncommon. Even if you and I had a similar enough setup at home with a straightforward path to exploitation, it's a few thousand people that self-host in a country with millions of people. It's not worth developing attacks for

VPS with public ipv4, connected to home network over Tailscale and forward the traffic with socat. You'd probably be fine opening a port directly but a small VPS is free most places so might as well make the most of it.

You can put the public facing stuff on a separate VLAN and have firewall rules that don’t give the VLAN access to LAN stuff. I only know how to do this with IPv4 though, IPv6 confuses me and I’m scared to get it wrong so I disabled it.

People might hack your toaster and burn your house down? Smart ovens? Smart microwaves? Smart fires?

My best guess is that only the power pins of that usb port is connected. So they're going over a debug port for io.

https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/index.xml

To be fair, it's a disposable vape.

Add a GPS and a few propellers to vapes so they can fly themselves directly into the nearest river, lake or (as a last resort) ocean once they're empty.

> It’s really hard to quite vaping btw.

They put addictive stuff in vapes, because of course they do.

I mean disposable vapes are just complete idiocy to begin with.

Vapes with pods are less expensive in the long run and offer a vastly superior vaping experience. You can get liquid for dirt cheap. If you smoke heavily, you might offset the initial investment in a week or two.

Disposable vapes offer zero advantages. They are only good if you want to "just try" it once or that is what you are going to tell yourself in your career of producing e-waste.

I wonder when an Android phone will be released that includes a vape attachment.

Don't think Apple would go there, but who knows....

Hey can you print this paper off my vape bro? I need to turn it in to my next class.