French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said the government is working on a bill to ban disposable e-cigarettes as the nation’s authorities seek to stop younger people from taking up smoking.
I took a few discarded ones apart. The plastic mouthpiece and bottom can be separated from the metal tube with pliers or a pocket knife. Pulling the bottom out will slide out the internals.
Breath controller (mic and some circuitry) and maybe an LED in the bottom piece (looks like this)
Something like cotton wool infused with some volatile substance that is 2% nicotine (I hope I didn’t get addicted to it at this point), still very wet and smelly
3 cm (1.2 in) of resistive wire (about 2 Ω) in a woven sleeve inserted into the wool. The power to it is controlled by the breath controller. The peak power is about 8 W, a lot for such a tiny battery and thin wires!
There is a capacitive (electret) mic and air blows past it, and some models have a ring that adjusts the airflow non-electronically. A chip on the mic’s tiny PCB crudely measures sound level (which is way higher when breathing as opposed to any other sound) and drives its power transistor to switch the heater. It probably also refuses to work below 2.5 V to prevent the battery from discharging too deep. Some models also drive an LED with their heater output.
Musicians use breath controllers to play digital wind instruments but those are obviously more sensitive and complicated (likely using a piezoelectric or MEMS pressure sensor on a membrane of a chamber the user breathes into).
Here’s a video of it in action (turns out it flashes for a while after you stop breathing) and the best photo I could take with my phone and two magnifying glasses (sadly, the trick of a water droplet over the camera didn’t work because of its hydrophobic coating).
I took a few discarded ones apart. The plastic mouthpiece and bottom can be separated from the metal tube with pliers or a pocket knife. Pulling the bottom out will slide out the internals.
InterestingI always wondered how the activation trigger worked, you said there is a mic?
There is a capacitive (electret) mic and air blows past it, and some models have a ring that adjusts the airflow non-electronically. A chip on the mic’s tiny PCB crudely measures sound level (which is way higher when breathing as opposed to any other sound) and drives its power transistor to switch the heater. It probably also refuses to work below 2.5 V to prevent the battery from discharging too deep. Some models also drive an LED with their heater output.
Musicians use breath controllers to play digital wind instruments but those are obviously more sensitive and complicated (likely using a piezoelectric or MEMS pressure sensor on a membrane of a chamber the user breathes into).
Here’s a video of it in action (turns out it flashes for a while after you stop breathing) and the best photo I could take with my phone and two magnifying glasses (sadly, the trick of a water droplet over the camera didn’t work because of its hydrophobic coating).