| ▲ | GeertB 4 hours ago |
| For these devices the microcontroller needs to be super cheap. Microcontrollers like the Puya PY32 Series (e.g., PY32C642, PY32F002/F030) can cost in the $0.02 - $0.05 range for the kind of many-million volumes applicable for disposable vapes. These are 32-bit ARM Cortex M0 MCUs, running at a 24 MHz clock or similar, some with 24 KB of ROM and maybe 3 KB of RAM! To put into context: this is 3x the ROM/RAM of the ZX81 home computer of the early 1980s. The ARM M0 processor does full 32-bit multiplication in hardware, versus the Z80 that doesn't even offer an 8-bit multiply instruction. If we look at some BASIC code doing soft-float computation, as was most common at the time, the execution speed is about 3 orders of magnitude faster, while the cost of the processor is 2 - 3 orders of magnitudes less. What an amazing time we live in! |
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| ▲ | pjmlp an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| Which is why when folks nowadays say "you cannot use XYZ for embedded", given what most embedded systems look like, and what many of us used to code on 8 and 16 bit home computers, I can only assert they have no idea how powerful modern embedded systems have become. Now that it is a pity that when people talk about saving the planet everyone keeps rushing to dispoable electronics, what serves me to go by bycicle to work, be vegetarian, recicle my garbage, if everyone is dumping tablets, phones and magnificient thin laptops into the ground, and vapes of course. |
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| ▲ | pkolaczk an hour ago | parent [-] | | > Which is why when folks nowadays say "you cannot use XYZ for embedded", given what most embedded systems look like, and what many of us used to code on 8 and 16 bit home computers, I can only assert they have no idea how powerful modern embedded systems have become. Yet, I still need to wait about 1 second (!) after each key press when buying a parking ticket and the machine wants me to enter my license plate number. The latency is so huge I initially thought the machine was broken. I guess it’s not the chip problem but terrible programming due to developers thinking they don’t need to care about performance because their chip runs in megahertz. | | |
| ▲ | stavros an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Or maybe they think they should be sending each keystroke to a server and waiting for the response. | |
| ▲ | csomar an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Everyone was locked out in a building am staying at (40 something stories) for several hours. When I asked the concierge if I can have a look at the system, it turns out they had none. The whole thing communicated with AWS for some subscription SaaS that provided them with a front-end to register/block cards. And every tap anywhere (elevators/doors/locks) in the building communicated back with this system hosted on AWS. Absolute nightmare. | | |
| ▲ | exikyut an hour ago | parent [-] | | I wonder what happened to the building when us-east-1 went down. | | |
| ▲ | csomar 15 minutes ago | parent [-] | | This is in SEA. They probably operate from ap-southeast-1 or 2. But yeah, if the internet goes down, the provider service goes down or AWS goes down they are cooked. |
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| ▲ | pjmlp an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | What can you expect, when people assume as normal shipping the browser alongside the "native" application, and scripting languages using an interpreter are used in production code? Maybe that ticket machine was coded in MicroPython. /s | | |
| ▲ | eru an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Interpreters don't have to be slow. Forth is usually interpreted and pretty fast. And, of course, we have very fast Javascript engines these days. Python speed is being worked on, but it's pretty slow, true. | | |
| ▲ | anthk an hour ago | parent [-] | | Some Forths are dog slow such as PFE compared to GForth. Meanwhile others running in really slow platforms such as subleq (much faster in muxleq) run really fast for that the VM actually as (almost something slightly better than a 8086). |
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| ▲ | anthk 43 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | - TCL/Tk slowish under P3 times, decent enough under P4 with SSE2. AMSN wasn't that bad
back in the day, and with 8.6 the occasional UI locks went away. - Visual Basic. Yes, it was interpreter, and you used to like it. GUI ran fast, good for small games and management software. The rest... oh, they tried
to create a C64 emulator under VB, it ran many times slower than one created in C. Nowadays, with a P4 with SSE2 and up you could emulate it at decent speeds with TCL/Tk 8.6 since they got some optimized interpreter. IDK about VB6, probably the same case.
But at least we know TCL/Tk got improved on multiprocessing and the like. VB6 was stuck in time. - TCL can call C code with ease, since the early 90's. Not the case with Electron. And JS really sucks with no standard library. With Electron, the UI can be very taxing, even if they bundle FFMPEG and the like. Tk UI can run on a toaster. - Yeah, there is C#... but it isn't as snappy and portable TCL/Tk with IronTCL, where it even targets Windows XP. You have JimTCL where it can run on scraps. No Tk, but the language it's close in syntax to TCL, it has networking and TLS support and OFC has damn easy C interops. And if you are a competent programmer, you can see it has some alpha SDL2 bindings. Extend those and you can write a dumb UI with Nuklear or similar in days. Speed? It won't win against other languages on number crunching, but for sure it could be put to drive some machines. |
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| ▲ | torginus an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It also stood out to me how little stuff is in there - there's the uC itself, 3 transistors for heating the flavor canisters, an op-amp for the microphones, but other than that I don't really see anything - no external oscillator, no vrm (though a charger/BMS circuit must be in there somewhere). |
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| ▲ | uxhacker 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The idea that people are smoking arm chips makes me laugh. |
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| ▲ | ninalanyon 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| How close are we to smart dust I wonder? How small can we make wireless communications? |
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| ▲ | kvdveer an hour ago | parent [-] | | > How close are we to smart dust I wonder? How small can we make wireless communications? There's two limiting factors for 'smart dust': power (batteries are the majority weight and volume of this vape), and antennae (minimum size determined by wavelength of carrier wave). I believe you can fit an NFC module in a 5x5mm package, but that does externalize the power supply. | | |
| ▲ | slow_typist a minute ago | parent [-] | | RFID tags are powered wirelessly, one could imagine powering smaller particles when operating on higher frequencies (RFID is on 13.something MHz requiring relatively large coils). A directional antenna could send a pulsed beam to power a subset of the particles in the area and afterwards receive their signals. |
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| ▲ | eru an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > [...] while the cost of the processor is 2 - 3 orders of magnitudes less. Is that inflation adjusted? If not, the real cost difference is even starker. |
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| ▲ | tombert 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What a world we live in; we have gotten to a point where computers are so small and cheap that they can literally be “disposable”. It’s beautiful, I love it. |
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| ▲ | rob74 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | For my part, I hate anything explicitly labeled "disposable". As the author writes, you're supposed to recycle it, but how many people will do that if it has "disposable" written on it? Even worse, if it was truly disposable they could use a non-rechargeable battery, but because they have to keep up the pretense of it being reusable, they have to include a rechargeable battery with more dodgy chemistry that probably shouldn't end up in a landfill... | | |
| ▲ | eru an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Why recycle things that you can make them cheaper, with less resources and in higher quality from scratch? (The above is not so much about processors, but about plastics. As long as we are still burning any fossil fuels at all, we are probably better off holding off on recycling and instead burning the plastic for electricity to use ever so slightly less new fossil fuels for power, and instead use the virgin fossil fuels to make new plastics. Especially considering the extra logistics and quality degradation that recycling entails. Directly re-using plastic bottles a few times might still be worth it, though.) | | |
| ▲ | pbhjpbhj 42 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Is that a genuine question, or are you parodying an ignorant point of view? The World has limited resources, we don't have a spare. Do you need it spelling out more clearly? | | |
| ▲ | eru 15 minutes ago | parent [-] | | We are sitting on ball of matter of roughly 5,970,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg. We have a giant nuclear furnace in the centre of the solar system that's providing us with energy. |
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| ▲ | adrianN 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | To make matters worse, recycling is a scam (with a small handful of exceptions). | | |
| ▲ | rjh29 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Varies widely across country and the type of thing you're recycling. People are so extreme with recycling, it's either "recycle everything!" or "it's a scam, just chuck it all in the garbage" | | |
| ▲ | adrianN 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I’m relatively sure that electronics are not recycled properly anywhere. At best some of the metals are extracted (hopefully not by mixing the ashes with mercury). | |
| ▲ | vasco 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It varies very widely indeed. In some countries it isn't a scam because it gets burned like Denmark but other than that majority of recycling just means shipping it to a landfill in a poor country that they promise to recycle. | | |
| ▲ | chpatrick 27 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | In Hungary it gets sorted out locally. We also recently implemented a bottle return system that (although it's annoying) produces clean stacks of PET, aluminium and glass, all of which are recyclable. | |
| ▲ | eru an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Well, it depends a lot on material. Metals, especially aluminum, get widely recycled because it actually makes financial sense. Plastics, well, you are probably better off burning them for electricity. | |
| ▲ | nandomrumber an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > because it gets burned I wouldn’t really call that recycling. |
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| ▲ | stmL 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Can you elaborate on that? Edit: I'm actually curious l, i don't know how recycling supposed to work for electronics and how it can be a scam. | | |
| ▲ | mngnt 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | This youtube video explains why plastic recycling exists, how it's mostly ineffective and why is it a scam created to normalize one-use plastic. This basically applies to electronics and others. "Why would I reuse or reduce, I can buy, consume an recycle". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g | | |
| ▲ | pbhjpbhj 36 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Tax CEOs of vape companies the percentage of their vapes that their company doesn't physically retrieve from customers to be recycled ... |
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| ▲ | csomar an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > As the author writes, you're supposed to recycle it, but how many people will do that if it has "disposable" written on it? You need to offer an incentive (ie: discount on new vape if you recycle) and then, from my experience, most people will recycle. |
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| ▲ | smj-edison 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It reminds me of how Sussman talked about someday we'd have computers so small and cheap that we'd mix dozens in our concrete and be put throughout our space. |
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| ▲ | SuperMouse 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I've bought hundreds of Puya's for my lab stock on LCSC. Neat little things! |
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| ▲ | torginus 40 minutes ago | parent [-] | | How usable are they for hacking? I've had bad experiences with more obscure chips requiring custom programmers/debuggers. |
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