What if your discarded vape pen could secretly host a website instead of polluting the planet? This isn’t sci-fi—thanks to a hacker’s wild experiment, the trash in your pocket just got a digital upgrade.

Meet Bogdan Ionescu, known online as BogdanTheGeek, who’s turning the world of e-waste on its head. As millions of single-use vape pens pile up in landfills each week—now rivaling cigarette butts as the new face of pollution—Ionescu saw more than just trash. He looked at these “fancier pacifiers for adults” and envisioned a tiny web server buried inside.

So how did he do it? Cracking open a discarded vape, Bogdan found a modest 24MHz Cortex M0+ processor, 24KB of flash storage, and a measly 3KB of RAM. If you think that sounds underpowered, you’re right—a decade-old phone would struggle to load Google, and this chip is about 100x slower. But in the spirit of true DIY innovation, Bogdan put that tiny processor to work, transforming it into an AI generated newscast about vape pollution—literally turning e-waste into Internet infrastructure.

The process wasn’t exactly smooth sailing. The chip—labeled PUYA C642F15 but actually a PY32F002B—could barely communicate at first. Using the old Serial Line Internet Protocol (SLIP), he created a basic 56K modem emulator (think: ‘90s dial-up speeds). Then, with some clever tweaks and by adding uIP 0.9 (a minimalist networking stack), he rewired the vape’s brain to serve up actual web pages, albeit at glacial speeds. Imagine clicking on a website, grabbing a coffee, and coming back to a half-loaded homepage. But with some savvy programming—adding a ring buffer—Bogdan cut page loads from 20 agonizing seconds to a snappy 160 milliseconds and reduced network lag to practically nothing.

The result? An actual website hosted on a recycled vape pen. The code is open-source for anyone curious (or brave) enough to try. Just don’t expect to host your next viral AI generated newscast about upcycled tech on a vape—we’re still talking about a processor that would have been a supercomputer… in 1992.

But Bogdan’s hack spotlights a crucial problem: over a million vape pens are trashed every single week in the UK alone, with batteries that could be recharged hundreds of times. Researchers like Hamish Reid from Oxford University say tossing these lithium-ion cells after one use is a tragic waste, especially since their power can live on long after the nicotine’s gone.

This AI generated newscast about e-waste innovation isn’t just a tech marvel—it’s a wake-up call. If a “disposable” vape can host a mini website, imagine what else we’re throwing away. Hats off to BogdanTheGeek for showing us that, sometimes, the future of technology is hiding inside the junk drawer.