CheckMag | Pico projector from an old smartphone and the VapeServer - two of the week's best hardware hacks
DIY Pico Projector
Building your own projector in principle is extremely simple. Strip away the reflective material from an LCD and shine a light through it. In practice, by the time you have accounted for optics and heat, the reality is somewhat different. DIY Perks did this around 5 years ago, turning a 4K display into a home cinema projector, and people have been turning old-school overhead projectors into digital projectors for decades.
However, no one has made the process of making a projector seem quite so easy as Huy Vector. Taking an old LCD from a smartphone (OLED won't work here) and building a case for it out of foam board and dropping a 20 Watt LED from AliExpress, with the lens from a magnifying glass, is pretty much all that's needed. Of course, there is some basic soldering required and a way to dissipate heat, but the hardest part seems to be stripping apart the phone display assembly and wiring in the motherboard. However, you could easily butcher a cheap display like this one from Amazon, and give yourself an easy way to add an HDMI input.
While it's not the brightest screen and the ageing Galaxy display is fairly low resolution, this could be a fun project that makes use of recycled parts that doesn't require DIY Perks level skill to achieve.
The VapeServer
While vaping itself is a perfectly legitimate way of keeping off the analogue cancer sticks, disposable vapes seem to be a completely unnecessary, overengineered, wasteful and environmentally damaging product. Especially when there are plenty of non-disposable solutions.
500,000 disposable vapes per day are discarded in the US alone, according to figures dating back to 2023. That number is likely far higher both now and when considering global markets, resulting in some governments banning them. However, it beggars belief that something so complex to engineer and produce is used for a couple of days then discarded.
Case in point, Bogdan Ionescu has hacked and upcycled a disposable vape into a functioning web server. Obviously, not all disposable vapes carry the same hardware, but one in particular was found to contain a PY32F002B microcontroller. Even the author admits that this particular microcontroller is "so bad it's basically disposable" but still proceeds to reverse engineer it enough to connect it to the internet and run a web server on it. The device doesn't come with any networking capability, but repurposing the USB serial as a 56K modem is enough to connect the device up to what is presumably a standard telephone line.
Summarising the write-up in this way doesn't do justice to the reverse engineering skills on display here, and the full article does a far better job of getting into the detail of how this was made possible. However, it does highlight the waste that goes into certain products as a means of making a buck. Hopefully more people find ways to repurpose these wasteful devices in addition to turning them into power-banks.
If you want to see how "blazing" fast the VapeServer actually is, you can load a copy of the article directly from the device itself by clicking here.
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