Engineer turns disposable vape pen into a working web server

Romanian engineer Bogdan Ionescu, known as BogdanTheGeek, repurposed a disposable vape pen into a functioning web server. By dissecting a vape containing a PUYA C642F15 chip (actually a PY32F002B with a 24 MHz Arm Cortex M0+ processor, 24KB flash, and 3KB RAM), he leveraged its modest hardware to run a basic web server. Using the Serial Line Internet Protocol (SLIP) and uIP 0.9 code, he enabled TCP/IP communication, initially facing slow response times and packet loss. After optimizing his code with a ring buffer and other tweaks, he reduced ping times to 20ms and page loads to about 160ms, hosting a webpage copied from his blog within the limited 20KB flash storage. Ionescu’s VapeServer project not only demonstrates technical ingenuity but also highlights the sustainability potential of reusing disposable vape electronics, which are often discarded despite containing functional microcontrollers,