Story perspectives

Repurposed Vapes: From Pollution to Potential Powerhouses

9/16/2025

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Summary

Story summary

Discarded vapes are increasingly recognized as a form of pollution, akin to cigarette butts.
Researcher Bogdan Ionescu repurposed a vape's chip into a web server, utilizing a 24MHz Cortex M0+ chip.
Initial performance suffered from high latency and packet loss, but improvements reduced latency to 20ms and page load time to 160ms.
A UK study found 1.3 million vapes are discarded weekly, indicating potential for reuse.
Lithium-ion batteries in vapes can be recharged over 450 times, demonstrating their value.

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Story summary

Discarded vapes are increasingly recognized as a form of pollution, akin to cigarette butts.
Researcher Bogdan Ionescu repurposed a vape's chip into a web server, utilizing a 24MHz Cortex M0+ chip.
Initial performance suffered from high latency and packet loss, but improvements reduced latency to 20ms and page load time to 160ms.
A UK study found 1.3 million vapes are discarded weekly, indicating potential for reuse.
Lithium-ion batteries in vapes can be recharged over 450 times, demonstrating their value.