“Microprocessors Everywhere”
Photo from Conclusive Engineering, underside of modern CPU.
By Scott Hamilton
I came across a very unique project from an individual in Romania. Bogdan Ionescu, who goes by the screen name BogdanTheGeek, discovered that a discarded vape pen contained a 24Mhz Arm Cortex M0+ processor with 3KB of RAM. Let’s put this a little into perspective. The Arm Cortex M0 is one of the processors still in use in modern cell phones. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the main processor in your cell phone, but it is one of many. This particular processor is widely used in multiple devices that need just a small amount of processing power to do specific tasks.
In the case of the vape pen, this processor is used to monitor sensors in the pen to control the flow of fluid through the pen and accurately control the level of nicotine and other chemicals in the vapor. It is way too powerful for just this use, but the fact that these processors come at a cost of just a few dollars, they turn out to be one of the less expensive components in the vape. The shocking thing is what they can be utilized for given the right level of ingenuity.
Bogdan pulled off a real world use for these vape pens that were considered trash. He turned one into a web-server and served a real live blog on the chip. This was not an easy feat by any stretch of the imagination. Bogdan not only had to make minor modifications to the pen, but also had to modify the source code to both the Linux kernel and the web-server source code to allow it to run smoothly in such a small memory space. Surprisingly his “VapeServer” held up pretty well until the traffic load caused it to buckle under the pressure as more and more curious geeks accessed the web server.
The really great part about this whole project is that Bogdan released all the required steps as well as the improved web-server source code on an open source project hosted on GitHub. Where other people saw junk, Bogden saw an opportunity. This allowed Bogdan to highlight the fact that we have lots of hidden technology inside millions of vapes tossed in the trash every week. Each vape has USB-C ports, rechargeable batteries and microcontrollers. His efforts are pushing technology recycling to a new level.
Having read about his accomplishments reminded me of how hard it is to get technology into some of the third world countries. Governments of these countries have a tendency to confiscate computer servers, laptops, PCs and even small, single board computers like the Raspberry Pi for government use, but vapes and other devices with these hidden technology sources are much less likely to get confiscated. There may be a real opportunity to sneak technology to the masses in these countries, if someone can expand on Bogdan’s efforts and find a way to use these microprocessors in new ways.
It also gave me some cause for concern, that if these vapes all have a microprocessor and any blue-tooth capabilities at all, they can act like tiny little spies. It would take little effort to use the same network protocols Bogdan utilized to turn these vapes into a device that captures network traffic and forwards it to a larger system for analysis, making it highly possible to extract data from secure networks with nothing more than a common vape pen. I was honestly shocked that they were using such a powerful little processor in something as simple as a vape pen. Where else are we finding what would have been leading technology 20 years ago running menial tasks, like controlling the charge on a battery?
I can tell you they are in more products than you can possibly imagine, including your key fob for your car, your microwave, your electric coffee maker, maybe even in a new toaster. There used to be a running joke in the computing industry that you can run Linux on anything, including a toaster. However I never expected that you can run Linux on a vape pen. Let’s just say I am completely fascinated and now I want to experiment with hidden technology myself.
Until next week, stay safe and learn something new.
Scott Hamilton is an Expert in Emerging Technologies at ATOS and can be reached with questions and comments via email to shamilton@techshepherd.org or through his website at https://www.techshepherd.org.
