Disposable vapes are rechargeable batteries wrapped in a throwaway habit.
When vapes first hit our streets, just before the COVID lockdowns in 2019, I thought: surely these devices have some reusable value. On various bike rides and dog walks I picked up a bunch, thinking better in my junk box than flowing into drains, rivers and waterways. At the time I heard of one or two people suggesting they have lithium batteries inside — not always well marked, but rechargeable, for all intents and purposes. I was mindful of the dangers of recharging unknown battery types, but curious all the same.
My brain seems to be wired in a waste-not mindset. Maybe it is influenced through growing up under a Communist regime of limited resources — the idea of making the most of what you have through collecting, fixing, reusing and repurposing. Refusing to bin useful hardware.
So slowly my junk box filled up with disposed vapes.
The internals are pretty self-explanatory: a battery, a vape liquid dispenser and a few pieces of electronics. Sometimes I even collected a number of vapes that were made for reuse, presumably just lost by the addict, including the USB recharging hardware.
I thought that this EZ-EV challenge would be a perfect opportunity for me to finally get my head around battery charging and reconditioning. Not only vapes, but I had a bunch of other batteries that might need some conditioning or could be put to use in some way.
Not only vape cells but any disused e-waste like old headphones or phones
In researching the state of vape reuse, I can see that this has taken a huge step forward. Examples out there suggest people building power walls out of them, as well as little ocarinas. Some are even extracting the lithium for chemistry experiments.
On the general e-waste front, here in Melbourne there are a number of consumer shops that let you recycle your e-waste: batteries, phones, electronics. Of course my junk boxes are just like an e-waste recycling centre, without the recycling so far. The local Telco has only recently released a build of a synthesiser constructed completely from e-waste. This is inspiring stuff.
Now onto the EV. I had an old robot vacuum cleaner I could use as a base, and a chassis for a “Braitenberg vehicle” I once started, but seeing a recent post on a battery-powered train made me think I should rekindle another one of my hobbies — model railways. The final platform might be an N-scale train EV, inspired by Fortescue’s all-electric heavy-haul trains running across the Pilbara in Western Australia.
Clockwise from top: NYU’s vape synth as featured in WIRED, Chris Doel and his vape power wall project, Fortescue’s battery powered “infinity train” and Telstra’s e-waste synth
The Problem
Reuse is only credible if the cells are monitored properly, not guessed at. A salvaged cell pulled from a discarded vape has an unknown history — it may have been deep-discharged, overcharged, or just plain tired. Dropping it into a pack with a simple cutoff board and hoping for the best is not good enough.
The solution
What this project calls for is a smart BMS (Battery Management System) approach: per-cell visibility, voltage and temperature tracking, and health-aware decisions. Rather than treating the pack as a black box, each cell gets its own attention — flagging weak cells before they drag down the rest, and making charge and discharge decisions based on real data rather than assumptions.
That intelligence matters most when working with salvaged cells, because mixed history and uneven quality demand observability. A cell that looks fine in a spot-check can hide a problem that only shows up under load or over time. The monitoring stack has to catch that.
The hardware backbone for this is an RS485 bus connecting the cell monitors — a robust, noise-tolerant protocol well suited to the electrically messy environment of a discharging battery pack. RS485 is the same bus used in industrial BMS stacks and Modbus sensors, which means the tooling and libraries are mature.
Sitting at the top of that bus is the UNO Q: a board that pairs a real-time STM32 microcontroller with a Qualcomm processor running Linux. The STM32 side handles the timing-critical work — polling cells over RS485, enforcing cutoff thresholds — while the Linux side opens up a much richer analytical layer. Docker containers, YOLO inference models, data logging: things that would be unthinkable on a bare microcontroller become straightforward. There is also an appealing secondary use for the UNO Q: watching the train run a lap and visually monitoring the pack discharge in real time, with the Linux side offering enough headroom to run a live dashboard or even a camera-based model that tracks the loco position against battery state.
VapeCell EV takes discarded lithium, instruments it with a smart monitoring stack, and turns e-waste into motion.
Next
- get some battery charging stats using
CC/CV(Constant Current and Constant Voltage) - look at tracking data with the UNO Q
- see how best to utilise the UNO Q capabilities for a “Smart BMS”
