Rip It Apart

They are banned here in Australia, unfortunately it has created a huge black market for these things. Almost every neighborhood now has a cigarette store that also sells gifts and US chocolates that are basically just fronts for this stuff. Black market vapes and cigarettes. Even the police in many parts here don't really enforce this stuff. What I find even crazier than the batteries being disposed is that some of these have some decent processor tech in them. Like this one that has a 48Mhz ARM processor in. https://ripitapart.com/category/disposable-vape-hacks/

Here someone figured out how to drive the LCD screen from one. https://ripitapart.com/2013/03/02/making-use-of-an-old-ti-83-plus-lcd-…

Might take a while to get soldering skills good enough to handle 0.5mm BGA: https://ripitapart.com/2016/10/28/emmc-adventures-episode-1-building-m…

It has unfortunately. It's used in some of Keysight's oscilloscopes. Even the new ones. And it's not even a new version https://ripitapart.com/2018/10/15/gaining-access-to-the-windows-ce-des… Some of the later ones run Linux apparently but I've never seen one. All the Rigol ones are Linux based.

I also appreciate your responses! I especially appreciate the correction about the Z80's power supply requirements. > What's the energy efficiency difference between generating electricity with a hand crank vs. a nuclear reactor? A hand crank is about 95% efficient. An electromechanical generator is about 90% efficient. Your muscles are about 25% efficient. Putting it together, the energy efficiency of generating electricity with a hand crank is about 21%. Nuclear reactors are about 40% efficient, though that goes down to about 4% if you include the energy cost of building the power plant, enriching the fuel, etc. The advantages of the nuclear reactor are that it's more convenient (requiring less human attention per joule) and that it can be fueled by uranium rather than potatoes. > Even if you take into account all the inputs it takes to build and run the reactor, the overall output to input energy ratio is much higher. (...) The type of efficiency I'm thinking of is precisely the energy required to maintain and run something vs. the work you get out of it. The term for that ratio, which I guess is a sort of efficiency, is "ERoEI" or "EROI". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment#Nuclear_plan… says nuclear power plants have ERoEI of 20–81 (that is, 20 to 81 joules of output for every joule of input, an "efficiency" of 2000% to 8100%). A hand crank is fueled by people eating biomass and doing work at energy efficiencies within about a factor…