It’s superb that computing energy that was unthinkable for a person to even possess a number of many years in the past has now grow to be small and cheap sufficient to be disposable. The draw back of those developments is that many such gadgets — with completely good digital elements inside — are literally disposed of. That is fairly wasteful, and since many of those elements comprise poisonous supplies, there are quite a few potential unfavourable impacts to human well being and the atmosphere that may end result from tossing barely previous electronics within the landfill.
Luckily, there are numerous members of the Hackster neighborhood, and different like-minded people, that save these gadgets from winding up within the trash. And it isn’t only a good deed that these individuals are doing — additionally they get a number of free elements and even full gadgets that may be repurposed and given a brand new lease on life. Electronics hobbyist Jason Gin not too long ago got here throughout a very egregious case of completely good {hardware} that’s designed to be tossed within the rubbish — disposable vapes.
The lithium-ion battery (📷: Jason Gin)
The place Gin lives, the Kraze HD7K disposable vape is kind of well-liked, to the purpose that these gadgets continuously wind up by the facet of the street. It’s fairly well-known that vape pens have substantial lithium-ion batteries onboard to warmth and vaporize the liquid contained inside them, so many individuals will seize them to snag some free rechargeable batteries. However that’s solely the tip of the iceberg. The Kraze HD7K mannequin, for instance, additionally has a shade LCD show display screen and a fairly highly effective microcontroller to drive it.
As a primary step in understanding what these vapes might be used for, Gin did an in-depth teardown of the {hardware}. After getting the case cracked open, a 13450-size lithium-ion pouch cell battery was discovered. There was additionally an 80 × 160 pixel LCD show, a Nations Applied sciences N32G031K8Q7-1 microcontroller with a 48MHz Arm Cortex-M0 processor, 64 kilobytes of inner flash, and eight kilobytes of SRAM. A 1 megabyte SPI flash reminiscence chip was additionally housed within the casing.
The onboard microcontroller (📷: Jason Gin)
Subsequent, Gin did some reverse engineering work, focusing particularly on the show since that could be a distinguished characteristic of the gadget. After discovering the SPI interface and checking some documentation, it was demonstrated that arbitrary textual content and graphics might be displayed just by utilizing the Adafruit Graphics Library.
There are positively some worthwhile elements to salvage, however Gin additionally wished to know if the complete gadget might be repurposed. As a step in that path, the gadget firmware was dumped and analyzed. After some digging, Gin discovered what gave the impression to be RGB565-encoded photographs embedded inside the firmware.
Re-purposing the show (📷: Jason Gin)
Swapping these out can be a enjoyable solution to begin altering the vape pen, so Gin determined to switch the prevailing icons to present the person interface a Home windows 95 theme. That might not be helpful for somebody like Gin who doesn’t vape, however it’s a dialog starter, if nothing else. The following logical step (for a {hardware} hacker, anyway) is to get Doom to run on the vape. Gin is searching for assist with that, so should you suppose you might be as much as the duty, try the undertaking write-up to brush up on the fundamentals of the Kraze HD7K.
