Engineer Uses Disposable Vape To Make High-Speed Web Server
The engineer used the server to host a copy of the blogpost he wrote.
An engineer made a "blazingly fast" web server out of a disposable vape, according to a blog post from him.
Bogdan Lonescu has been collecting vapes from friends and family, retrieving electronic parts from them, such as batteries, to use for his "future projects".
He noticed that one of the more high-end vapes he was taking apart had an integrated circuit inside. After some research, he found out that it was a 'microcontroller', which is like a mini-computer on a chip, designed to carry out a specific function.
The microcontroller had flash storage, static random access memory and a Coretex M0+ (processing core) — all the components required to make a web server.
The exact specs were as follows:
24MHz Coretex M0+
24KiB of Flash Storage
3KiB of Static RAM
However, these specifications were not ideal to power internet access and webpage loading. Lonescu, however, found an alternate use for it, fashioning it into a web server.
"You may look at those specs and think that it’s not much to work with. 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," Lonescu wrote.
He created a makeshift dial-up modem through the microcontroller. Lonescu used a process to transfer data from the modem known as 'Serial Line Internet Protocol', via USB serial connection.
He further used a 'slattach' utility on his Linux computer to attach internet traffic to the fake modem and funneled the data through a 'socat' utility which translated the information and completed the connection.
Lonescu used uIP stack software to have the microcontroller respond to web page requests. Thus, emulating a web server using a discarded vape.
He worked out the "blazingly fast" aspect after refining his code so that the server would have pings that take 20 milliseconds, no packet loss and a full page load in about 160 milliseconds.
Lonescu used the server to host a copy of the blogpost he wrote. Despite his efforts, the webpage is throwing up '503' errors possibly due to the high volume of web traffic it has likely been receiving.
