Once upon a time, on USENET, someone had a .sig that predicted one day computers would be cheap enough they'd come in cereal boxes and we'd throw them away.
Interesting thing about li-ion batteries, is they have much less lithium in them than disposable lithium coin cell batteries, and hold much more charge. If we're outlawing disposable li-ions we should outlaw those as well.
We're OK with disposable alkaline batteries, so what makes lithium worse? If anything, alkaline batteries might have a slightly worse environmental footprint due to the use of manganese.
The problem with lithium batteries is that they can catch on fire, but that's a problem only when charged (or charging). A fully discharged battery shouldn't do much.
> We're OK with disposable alkaline batteries, so what makes lithium worse?
No we're not. Disposable batteries should not be a thing anywhere, especially not in products where they cannot easily be removed by design. Alkaline batteries may not combust when damaged, but their internal juice leaking out is damn corrosive.
> A fully discharged battery shouldn't do much.
Even that is enough to light trash compactor trucks or the heaps on waste collection plants to fire. This shit is becoming a massive problem for the trash hauler and processing industry. One in Australia blames 35 (!) fires a day in the country... no surprise if 1.8 million of them are sold a week [1]. This is frankly insane, and the rise in trash fires directly corresponds with disposable vapes.
Additionally, we need every bit of lithium we can get for electric vehicles and other stuff. Not for throwaway devices.
Indeed these things are an abomination. I regularly find half consumed vapes at intersections where they have clearly been accidentally dropped and abandoned by cyclists. I have a nice collection of perfectly good lithium batteries.
Just spitballing here, but considering that at typical intersections, automobile traffic outnumbers cyclist traffic by at least 100:1, isn't it more likely that those vapes were throw out the window of a car when someone got frustrated they clogged or something? (I'm not a vaper, but I've heard of clogged vapes being a common occurrence).
> I regularly find half consumed vapes at intersections where they have clearly been accidentally dropped and abandoned by cyclists. I have a nice collection of perfectly good lithium batteries.
If true, then the hedonism and pleasure seeking (the homeostatic pleasure trap is a monkey trap) found within the big, global industrial complex is meant for a small set of secret hackers to take advantage of by collecting disposed "vape" or smoking pleasure devices for powering some cool nerd contraptions.
Don't be afraid to get your hands dirty when you pick up trash. Because capitalism produces treasure when it excretes its waste products.
You just have to be outside the capitalist world-system to do this cool trick.
I've collected a few of them and they are robust and rechargable batteries. A common battery is
IP17350 1100mAh 4.07Wh
(Date of manufacture the one I see on the one I'm holding is 20210613).
Anyone got any idea to use them besides small flashlights? They also have a pressure sensor on the LED and a nice metal case pretty often.
Depending on the battery there are cheap AliExpress boards - or diy - to make tiny UPSes for a raspberry pi or other usb-powered device. I don't know for that specific battery; I have some that take 18650s, though.
One 18650 can get you several hours of runtime for a pi zero. The battery can cost more than the zero. The cheaper one cell UPS boards are about $2 (plus shipping).
An advantage of single cell UPSes is that you don't have to worry about balancing, which is a bit of a pain with scavenged cells.
The rechargeable lithium batteries in those really doesn't fit the "lithium shortage" and "we don't have enough battery capacity to build an EV for everyone" narrative
It takes around 850g of lithium carbonate to produce one kWh of lithium batteries. The current market price for lithium carbonate is about $14/kg. The base spec Tesla Model 3 has a 57.5kWh battery pack, so the lithium in the pack represents a cost of ~$685, or just under 2% of the list price of the vehicle.
A typical disposable vape contains about five cents worth of lithium.
Another post in this thread mentions 1.8 million disposable vapes being sold per week in Australia. So that corresponds to 131 EV batteries per week. Or roughly 48000 EV batteries per year. 87000 EVs were registered in Australia in 2023.
Make of that what you want, but disposable electronics to administer nicotine seem to be a major waste.
The materials for one EV battery can make ~30 e-bikes, and currently EVs are too expensive for most people.
The way to fix that and the way that industry is fixing it is to make batteries more efficient (higher-density, new anodes/cathodes) in parallel with making a bunch more of them (and mining more lithium).
If we succeed in making a $25k EV, the batteries used in those vapes will be _even cheaper_.
I don’t think it’s desirable and I find the waste appalling, but I do think that disposable batteries can only be expected to grow without intervention.
A popular theory is that they use "QC reject" grade, as the batteries often have arount 800 mAh capacity, two times less than most basic commercial grade.
Hopefully zero! Still, if you replace your car (or its battery) every 10 years (pretty long IMO) and smoke one vape a day (yikes), you'll use more cells on your car than your vapes.
I would hope that too. I imagine that as long as the pack still works, most cars will be sold forward on the used market. If the pack fails (either due to cell death or a crash or whatever), I bet many of them will not be properly recycled, especially from the early days. Once most cars are EVs, recycling will probably get better.
Either way, it seems pretty unfair to assume that EV packs will be 100% recycled, while vape packs will be 0% recycled. One could imagine a sort of "core charge" for disposable vapes. Bring the vape back for recycling when you get a new one and get $2 off. This could even be done by law like California CRV for cans and bottles.
The kind of people who can afford to buy EVs buy a new car what, every 3 years? So I guess about 1/3 of a car (or, using the numbers from another comment, about 4000 vapes' worth).
The lithium in those cheap disposable things are less "lithium" and more "metallic powder/paste that theoretically contains elements of lithium." It's not something you'd want to actually use in anything important like a car battery
Not true. "Disposable" vapes use commodity li-ion cells, of the same basic type that you'd find in a cellphone, a laptop or an EV. They probably aren't the best quality, but there's nothing unusual about the chemistry or packaging. Li-ion cells are the preferred chemistry because of the very high discharge rate - alkaline or primary lithium cells just can't deliver enough current. The cell is perfectly capable of being recharged, but some people prefer the convenience of a disposable device and manufacturers are quite happy to respond to that demand.
It's wasteful, I don't particularly approve of it, I expect to see a lot of jurisdiction ban disposable vapes, but nor do I think it's particularly egregious or meaningfully impacting on the commodity price of lithium carbonate.
some people prefer the convenience of a disposable device
I don't understand this. Instead of plugging it into a charger, they'd rather go to the store to buy another, or more likely order online and wait for it to be delivered?
i don't have personal experience with this, but i imagine so, because if you plug your vape into a charger, you can smoke it in an hour or two, and if you buy a cigarette at the convenience store that's a block away, you can smoke it in two minutes
maybe you live somewhere without convenience stores
I introduced a battery charger to a group of people that used disposable vapes and the knowhow to charge them. It changed the way they interacted with the vapes completely even saying funny high ideas like "we should patent this".
> Killer micros of today are a lot like flourescent lights -- cheap to operate, prevalent, and expensive to turn off. To see a machine standing idle, when you were raised as a child to "use cycles efficiently" is a gut-wrenching experience. Just remember Alan Kay's prediction: In the future, computers will come in cereal boxes and we will throw them away.
March 20, 1990. I haven't found a source for Alan Kay's prediction.
Various fortune files attribute the quote to Robert Lucky. I would guess that it was misattributed to Alan Kay since quotes often get attached to famous people.
"In the future, you're going to get computers as prizes in breakfast cereals.
You'll throw them out because your house will be littered with them.
-- Robert Lucky"
At a certain point it's more about the semantics of what a "computer" is. I don't know if I'd count an ASIC from a musical greeting card, though; and even within general purpose devices, microcontrollers vs microprocessors are typically delineated by the presence of an MMU.
If I can program it to execute a sequence of arithmetic and logical operations that approximate a Turing machine (with a finite band), and reprogram it at a later date to execute a different sequence of such operations, that's a computer to me. I wouldn't count ASICs, but the PIC12F508 or the 3-cent microcontroller referenced in the post definitely count.
Though by my definition of requiring reprogrammability and Turing completeness I am purposefully excluding many things that have historically been considered computers, like the many mechanical computers of the 19th and 20th century. From that standpoint I can see how some people might count ASICs as computers, even if I don't think that fits modern usage.
the 6502, 8080, z80, 8085, 8086, 65816, 68000, and 68010 were universally described as microprocessors, not microcontrollers, but did not have mmus built in (and of these only the 68010 could easily have one bolted on, as i understand it)
i think typically the thing that distinguished these from microcontrollers like the 8031, 8051, 8748, 8751, pic1650, etc., is that the microcontrollers had program memory built into them, either rom, eprom, or, starting in the 90s, flash. so they didn't need to be booted, they didn't need program ram, and in fact for a lot of applications they didn't need any external ram at all
Arguing about hard definitions differentiating microprocessor from microcontrollers based on single feature is pointless. It's a vague product/marketing category for certain usecases. There will be group of features that are more likely included or not included, but for most of them there will likely be exceptions. And the set of available features available MCUs and microprocessors change over the time. As technology improves both microcontrolers and processors are gaining new capabilities.
* MCUs usually have program memory builtin. But then there chips like RP2040 or ESP32 which while considered MCUs are used with external Flash memory chips for storing the firmware.
* MCUs usually have builtin RAM. But there are also some capable of directly using external RAM.
* Then there are things like apple M1 chips, with a lot of stuff builtin you still don't call them MCU.
* A bunch of ARM application processors/SOCs/Microprocessors might have enough resources builtin that they could be used as more or less standalone microcontrollers, without external RAM or flash memory.
* some early microprocessors used external MMUs and it took some time until the processors settled on architecture that's closer to how we have things now
* early personal computer processors were in a weird category in terms of price and processing power, in certain time period it wasn't impossible that similar microprocessor chip was used both for as main computer CPU and also for peripheral devices.
The microprocessor name in my opinion at this point is slightly outdated. It's not like anyone beside hobbyists is making non micro processors out individual relays, transistors or logic chips.
mostly i agree; it's mostly a marketing distinction rather than a technical one
actually i think non-micro (multi-integrated-circuit) processors are becoming popular again. the 'microprocessor' moniker wasn't coined to distinguish processors built out of discrete transistors from processors built out of integrated circuits; that was the 'second-generation computer' vs. 'third-generation computer' distinction back in the 01960s. what made a microprocessor 'micro' was that it was a chip instead of a circuit board
I believe 68000 could use an MMU, but the catch was that it couldn't do demand paging, just memory protection and virtual/physical translation. I can't find the specific explanation right now, but it's something along the lines of the bus error exception (needed to actually stop the memory cycle) being special in a way that sometimes causes an incorrect PC value to be pushed to the stack. So you could terminate a process on an MMU exception, but resuming it was not reliable.
There was at least one company (Apollo, I think) that implemented demand paging on 68000 by using two 68000s. You had one, the leader, running as the "real" CPU, with the other, the follower, executing the same code on the same data but delayed by one instruction.
If the leader got a bus error they would generate an interrupt on the follower to stop it before it executed the bus erroring instruction.
The leader and follower would then switch roles, and the new leader could deal with the situation that had caused the bus error on the former leader.
I feel that the semantics are quickly becoming irrelevant. Many everyday items like sports watches, toys, kitchen appliances, alarm clocks or table radios already have more processing power, more memory and storage, higher resolution screen and better network connectivity than my first desktop. Running Doom on mundane items like key fobs and light bulbs isn't too far away from where we are in 2024.
Yeah, I remember looking into getting a refurbished cloud server instead of a brand new desktop a decade ago or so. They weren't free, but you'd still get a machine with 40 cores and 120gb of RAM for only $400. Pre-Ryzen, it was a very attractive offer.
I never ended up buying one, because it'd consume way more power than made sense, and they're kinda shitty for gaming/workstation use due to low single-core performance and NUMA issues.
There’s been generic microcontrollers (usually single shot programmable) available for less than 3 cent per mcu for half a decade already. Check out Padauk and similar MCUs.
I remember receiving this video ad for a Chevy pickup truck in a print issue of Popular Mechanics circa 2015 [0]. When disassembled, it consisted of a screen, battery, speaker, and circuit board. What the article doesn't say is that the circuit board had a micro-USB port which when connected to a computer mounted the internal storage as a drive, with the four-or-so videos it played accessible. I actually managed to find an existing home video video with the correct format (I wasn't familiar with FFmpeg at the time) and when one of the internal videos was replaced with mine (with the same filename), it would play instead. I believe the micro-USB also charged the internal LiPo battery as well, as I don't recall being worried too much about battery life. I probably still have the thing somewhere!
[0] https://www.tubefilter.com/2015/04/16/chevrolet-video-ads-in...
And they have a whole slew of magazine inserts that they've done. I'm convinced now that I saw one of these magazine inserts, but not the one on the Chevy. Thanks for helping me track it down! I'm really close...
It was this advertisement, I remember the cover. Sorry I wasn't very specific earlier, but I didn't realize how many "throwaway computers inside of magazines" that there were. I guess I assumed this was a one-off event with Microsoft's 365 WiFi cloud (now that I remember the chip, lol).
That day appears to have arrived.