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E-cigarettes are bad For your body and definitely bad for the planet; The world’s landfills are Disposable steam filled Cartridges. But now there’s a way to put a little more fun into all that electronic waste.
Vape synth is a project created by a group of makers in New York City who disassembled disposable Elf Bar nicotine vaporizers, hacked them, and turned them into digital musical instruments. The resulting device still looks like a vape cartridge, but with a small speaker nestled amid a cluster of lights and buttons. To turn it on, you have to put your mouth on it and draw your breath in, as you would in a vape.
Think of it like digital Ocarina. Vape Synth reuses the low pressure sensor found in the atomizer. By absorbing the wind through the sensor, this may act as reflects Digital Ocarina – You operate an oscillator circuit and generate an audio signal. Pressing the buttons causes different tones to appear. The sounds that come out are, frankly, loud and chaotic. (This is what it sounds like.)
The people who made the Vape Synth know that it looks goofy. This is the point.
“We started from a very silly place,” says Carrie Love, one of the creators of Vape Synth. “We have to use a low pressure sensor. That means if it turns on, it must be bad.”
Love and David Rios are professors in the Interactive Communications Program at New York University. Shuang Kai is a doctoral student at Cornell University and teaches at New York University and Cornell. They’re all self-described hoarders and rescue product makers who work on the Vape Synth Project under the moniker The Paper Bag Team. (None of them use nicotine.)
All three have introduced Vape Synth in talks Like open hardware top and play Workshops To build them in events like 2025 Low Tech Electronics exhibition. Another workshop was held last weekend in the hacker group New York City Resistant In Brooklyn. The team has also just released a comprehensive guide via directions On how to turn your vapes into synths.
“They’re huge e-waste products,” Love says of spent e-cigarettes. “You see them everywhere. They have lithium-ion batteries, which makes them particularly insidious in the world of disposable technology.”
When the FDA ordered Juul, once the king of e-cigarettes, to do so Withdrew its product From the US market, it paved the way for other – completely disposable – devices to flood shelves. The multi-billion dollar e-cigarette business has already boomed, with the advent of the devices Pour in From countries like China and dozens of brands are born with names like the titles of SoundCloud rap songs. (Pillow Talk, Hyppe Bar, PolkaDot, Puff Bar.)