A vape pen, broken into parts, all laid out on a cutting mat

2022 Hackaday Prize: Disposable Vape Pens Turned Project Parts

May 5, 2022 by Arya Voronova 48 Comments

Disposable vape pens, a sub-genre of electronic cigarettes, have been a fad for a few years now – they’re small self-contained devices with a rechargeable battery and some vape liquid inside. As the battery discharges and the liquid runs out, the entire vape pen is typically thrown out. [Dimitar] wants to change that, however, and teaches us how to reuse as much of the vape pen as possible — as yet another underappreciated source for parts we can use in our projects.

In an extensive worklog, he breaks down and documents a vape pen’s inner workings, coupled with a video we’ve placed below the break showing ways to disassemble them. In these, he shows how we can reuse the casing and the plastic parts, should any of us be interested in a project that happens to fit the e-cig form factor. Attention is paid to the sensor that triggers the evaporation — it may look like a microphone, but is actually a purpose-built pressure-sensor with a high-side switch! He tears into one of these in a separate video, showing how to reuse it as a capacitive touch controller. He also aiming to assemble a small database of related resources on GitHub, currently, hosting the files for the protection circuit he developed as part of his recommendations for safely reusing vape pen Li-ion batteries.

[Dimitar]’s journey is ongoing, and we can’t wait to see some fun uses for these components that he will certainly stumble upon on his way! For instance, here’s a hacker using an e-cig battery to power a pair of RGB LED-adorned sunglasses, replacing the AAAA battery they originally came with. We’ve seen hackers make guides on reusing each and every part of microwave ovens, printers and laptops, and we ourselves have talked about reusing ATX power supplies and computer mice.

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Recycling Plastic Into Filament

April 28, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 43 Comments

Plastic is a remarkable material in many ways. Cheap, durable, and versatile, it is responsible for a large percentage of the modern world we live in. As we all know, though, it’s not without its downsides. Its persistence in the environment is quite troubling, so any opportunity we can take to reduce its use is welcome. This 3D printed machine, although made out of plastic, is made out of repurposed water bottles that have been turned into the filament for the 3D printer.

While there’s not too much information available on the site, what we gather is that the machine cuts a specific type of plastic water bottle made out of PET plastic into strips, and then feeds the strips into a heated forming tool. The tool transforms the strips into the filament shape and spools them so they are ready to feed back into a 3D printer. As a proof of concept, it seems as though this machine was made from repurposed plastic, but it could also be made using whatever filament you happen to have on hand.

As far as recycling goes, this is a great effort to keep at least some of it out of landfills and oceans. Unfortunately, plastic can’t be recycled endlessly like metal, as it will eventually break down. But something like this could additionally save on some filament costs for those with access to these types of bottles. Other options for creating your own filament also include old VHS tapes, but you will likely need a separate machine for that.

Finally, A Use For Old Cellphones

December 4, 2021 by Elliot Williams 50 Comments

In what is now a three-year long search, I’ve finally found the perfect use for an old cellphone. And with it, the answer to a burning question: Why aren’t we hacking cellphones?

First, the application. The Octo4a project lets you use an old Android phone as a 3D printer server, web interface, and even time-lapse camera to make those nice movies where the print seems to grow up out of nothing before your eyes. It’s the perfect application for an old phone, making use of the memory, WiFi, graphics capabilities, and even the touch-screen if you want local control of your prints.

Connecting to the phone was the main hurdle that I’ve always seen in developing for cellphone projects, because I have robotics applications in mind. But Octo4a gets around this with low or no effort. Most 3D printers are designed to run on USB anyway, so connecting it to the phone is as simple as buying a USB OTG cable. With the USB port taken over, powering the phone long-run becomes a tiny problem, which can be solved with a Y-cable or a little solder. Keep the OS from going to sleep, somehow, and it’s problem solved!

But here’s why this isn’t a solution, and it points out the deeper problem with cellphone hacking that many pointed out in the comments three years ago. Octoprint is written in Python, and because of this is very easy to write extensions for and to hack on, if that’s your thing. When I first saw Octo4a, I thought “oh great, a working Android Python port”. Then I went to dig into the code.

Octo4a is written in Kotlin and uses the Gradle framework. It’s a complete port of Octoprint, not just to a different platform, but to a different programming language and to an almost entirely different programming paradigm. My hat is off to [feelfreelinux] for doing it, but my guess is that the community of other people fluent enough in Kotlin and Python to help port across upstream changes in Octoprint is a lot smaller than the community of Python programmers would have been. Octo4a is a great project, but it’s not a walk in the park to develop on it.

So all of you who wrote in the comments to my previous piece that it’s the Android software ecosystem that’s preventing phone reuse, well here’s the exception that proves your rule! A dedicated and talented, multi-lingual developer community could pull it off, but the hurdle is so high that few will rise to it.

Anyway, thanks [Feelfree Filip] for your great work! I’ll be putting this on my old S4.

Another Way To Recycle Those Empty Beverage Cans

November 27, 2021 by Orlando Hoilett 14 Comments

Do you ever sit around thinking of ways to repurpose things in your house? Well [BevCanTech] found a way to recycle some of his empty beverage cans by turning them into homemade wire.

The premise is simple. He cut 2 mm thick strips of wire from the beverage can along its circumference, creating a thin, long “wire” spool. He sanded the ends of each strip to crimp pieces of his homemade wire together. He found he could get about four meters from a standard-sized beverage can, probably roughly 12 oz, as he unraveled the can. He then used crimp connectors to connect his homemade wires to the battery terminals and also to the end of a flashlight. He used a red cap from another can as a pseudo light diffuser and lampshade, creating a pretty cool, almost lava lamp-like glow.

Maybe the meat of this project won’t be as filling as your Thanksgiving meal, but hopefully, it can serve as a bit of inspiration for your next freeform circuit design. Though you’ll probably want to smooth those sharp edges along your homemade wire.

Can We Repurpose Old Wind Turbine Blades?

October 8, 2021 by Lewin Day 90 Comments

Wind turbines are a fantastic, cheap, renewable source of energy. However, nothing lasts forever, and over time, the blades of wind turbines fatigue and must be replaced. This then raises the question of what to do with these giant waste blades. Thankfully, a variety of projects are exploring just those possibilities.

A Difficult Recycling Problem

Around 85% of a modern wind turbine is recyclable. The problem is that wind turbine blades currently aren’t. The blades last around 20 to 25 years, and are typically made of fiberglass or carbon fiber. Consisting of high-strength fibers set in a resin matrix, these composite materials are incredibly difficult to recycle, as we’ve discussed previously. Unlike metals or plastics, they can’t just be melted down to be recast as fresh material. Couple this with the fact that wind turbine blades are huge, often spanning up to 300 feet long, and the problem gets harder. They’re difficult and expensive to transport and tough to chop up as well.

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A New Spin On Empty Filament Spools For Part Storage

July 5, 2021 by Donald Papp 26 Comments

Empty spools from 3D printer filament are the kind of thing that begs to be repurposed, and one option is [3d-printy]’s vertical filament spool parts drawer design. The way this solution works is by using the spool to hold twelve vaguely pie-shaped drawers that can be individually unlocked and removed entirely, which makes accessing their contents (or dumping them out) much easier. This method requires the spools to be oriented vertically, so it ends up handling a bit like a Rolodex.

One downside of the design is that it requires two inserts to be installed on the inside of the spool walls, which act as guide rails and lock points for the drawers. Another is that managing a vertical spool can be a bit awkward, given its lack of flat surfaces. Happily, there is an option for a matching stand that not only provides a flat base, but keeps any accidentally-unlocked drawers from falling out and spilling their contents.

The project files are OpenSCAD files, which allows easy customization for different spool manufacturers and dimensions, and [3d-printy] provides measurements for some common ones. Another nice element of this design is that no single part uses more than 30 grams of filament, which makes printing them an attractive way to use up the last bits of filament rolls.

We’ve seen drawer-style storage for filament spools before, but haven’t seen a design quite like this one before. Watch an overview of the drawer design as well as the spool holders in the videos, embedded below.

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Discarded Plastic Laser-Cut And Reassembled

July 2, 2021 by Bryan Cockfield 15 Comments

The longevity of plastic is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it’s extremely durable, inexpensive, and easy to work with, but it also doesn’t biodegrade and lasts indefinitely in the environment when not disposed of properly. While this can mean devastating impacts to various ecosystems, it can also be a benefit if you happen to pick this plastic up and also happen to have a laser cutter around.

After cleaning and sorting plastic that they had found from various places, including scraps from a 3D printing facility, the folks at [dinalab] set about turning waste plastic into something that would be usable once more. After sorting it they shredded it and then melted it into sheets. They found that a sandwich press yielded the best results, as it kept the plastic at a low enough temperature to keep it from burning. Once its off of the press and properly cooled, the flat sheets of plastic can be sent to the laser cutter to be made into whatever useful thing they happen to need.

Not only does this process reuse plastic that would otherwise end up in the landfill (or worse, the ocean), it can also reuse plastic from itself since the scraps can be re-melted back into sheets. Plastic does lose some of its favorable material properties with repeated heat cycles, but we’d have to imagine this is negligible for the types of things that [dinalab] is creating. Of course, you can always skip the heat cycles entirely and turn waste plastic directly into 3D printer filament instead.

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