did you know that you can find free Cortex M0 development boards at the side of the road?

[tubetime@mastodon.social]

did you know that you can find free Cortex M0 development boards at the side of the road? folks call them disposable vapes but they're hackable, and i've reverse engineered a bunch of them! see https://github.com/schlae/VapeRE/

[tubetime@mastodon.social]

many of these vapes bring the ARM SWD lines out through the charging connector's CC lines. with a simple breakout board and an SWD dongle you can reprogram the firmware.

[tubetime@mastodon.social]

a typical vape board has
* cortex M0 MCU
* NOR flash IC
* a pushbutton or slide switch
* li-ion battery + charger
* nice LCD display (sometimes LED)
* differential pressure sensor
* coil driver(s) with voltage feedback

[tubetime@mastodon.social]

some fancy ones also have bluetooth and even a touchscreen! (i haven't reverse-engineered those yet)

[tubetime@mastodon.social]

what could you make out of a disposable vape without any hardware changes?

* flappy bird game (one button)
* magic 8 ball (magic "vape" ball?)
* "flute" (using pressure sensor)
* temperature data logger with waveform display
* adjustable battery power supply

[dzwiedziu@mastodon.social]

@tubetime
I wonder if it could be accurate enough for a lung capacity tester.

[jgilbert@mastodon.social]

@tubetime how about a random character generator or dice roller?

[isonno@mastodon.social]

@tubetime Add a bright LED for a fancy flashlight. Maybe also works as a small power bank to recharge your phone?

[xarph@rusty.cat]

@tubetime i'm sure the only hard part of getting a game boy or nes emulator running on one would be adding enough inputs