Engineer turned a vape into a web server

""I don't blame you, a 10y old phone can barely load Google, and this is about 100x slower. I, on the other hand, see a blazingly fast web server.""

""Pings took ~1.5s with 50 percent packet loss and a simple page took over 20 seconds to load. That's so bad, it's actually funny, and I kind of wanted to leave it there,""

""so bad, it's basically disposable""

A discarded vape pen contained a modest microcontroller: a 24MHz Cortex M0+ with 24KB flash and 3KB static RAM. The labeled PUYA C642F15 chip was identified as likely a PY32F002B capable of handling SLIP, enabling modem-like networking. A uIP 0.9 network stack was added and the file structure tweaked to serve web pages. Initial tests showed very high latency and packet loss, with page loads over 20 seconds. Introducing a ring buffer dramatically improved performance to about 20ms pings and ~160ms page loads, although the controller cannot sustain heavy request volumes. Source code and a hosted copy were published, but the live controller remains slow under load.

Read at Theregister