Firstly, safety – The batteries can still carry an electrical charge and can be dangerous still so if you are not confident then I would recommend you put the whole thing into battery recycling rather than try to break it down yourself first. For those who wish to contine I have put a guide below on how I disassemble and recycle the Elfbar 600 disposable electronic vapes or Cigarettes I find.
First of all, get your tools ready, I use a couple of pairs of different sized Pliers, some snippers and a screwdriver.
Tools Used For Disassembling Disposable Electronic Vape or CigaretteDisassembling Elfbar 600 Disposable Electronic Vape or Cigarette
Here we go, although the larger lid is easier to grab and get off, it doesn’t let you get the insides out easily from that end. So you need to find the little hole at the other end and use something small to lever it off.
Taking Off Lid Disassembling Elfbar 600 Disposable Electronic Vape or Cigarette
Once off you should be able to pull out all of the insides in one go
Pulling Out Insides Disassembling Elfbar 600 Disposable Electronic Vape or CigarettePulling Out Insides Disassembling Elfbar 600 Disposable Electronic Vape or Cigarette
Then take the other lid off as below
Taking Off Other Lid Disassembling Elfbar 600 Disposable Electronic Vape or CigaretteTaking Off Other Lid Disassembling Elfbar 600 Disposable Electronic Vape or Cigarette
Next separate the battery by cutting the wires. I would do the positive side first as there is only one wire to cut there.
Then just separate the remaining wires from the other material by cutting.
Cut Wires Disassembling Elfbar 600 Disposable Electronic Vape or CigaretteEnd Result From Disassembling Elfbar 600 Disposable Electronic Vape or Cigarette
Firstly, safety – The batteries can still carry an electrical charge and can be dangerous still so if you are not confident then I would recommend you put the whole thing into battery recycling rather than try to break it down yourself first. For those who wish to contine I have put a guide below on how I disassemble and recycle the Lost Mary or Bloody Mary disposable electronic vapes or Cigarettes I find.
First of all, get your tools ready, I use a couple of pairs of different sized Pliers, some snippers and a screwdriver.
Tools Used For Disassembling Disposable Electronic Vape or CigaretteDisassembling Lost Mary or Bloody Mary Disposable Electronic Vape or Cigarette
Here we go, grab the big pliers and give the lid a wiggle and a yank.
Removing Lid Disassembling Lost Mary or Bloody Mary Disposable Electronic Vape or CigaretteRemoving Lid Disassembling Lost Mary or Bloody Mary Disposable Electronic Vape or Cigarette
Pull the bits of rubber and material out of the lid.
Removing Material From Lid Disassembling Lost Mary or Bloody Mary Disposable Electronic Vape or CigaretteRemoving Material From Lid Disassembling Lost Mary or Bloody Mary Disposable Electronic Vape or Cigarette
Now grab your smaller pliers and you should be able to grab the clear bit of hard plastic within the main case to pull all of the insides out in one go.
Pulling Insides Out Disassembling Lost Mary or Bloody Mary Disposable Electronic Vape or CigarettePulling Insides Out Disassembling Lost Mary or Bloody Mary Disposable Electronic Vape or CigarettePulling Insides Out Disassembling Lost Mary or Bloody Mary Disposable Electronic Vape or Cigarette
Now you can remove the other lid from the main case.
Pulling Back Off Disassembling Lost Mary or Bloody Mary Disposable Electronic Vape or CigarettePulling Back Off Disassembling Lost Mary or Bloody Mary Disposable Electronic Vape or CigaretteInsides Out Disassembling Lost Mary or Bloody Mary Disposable Electronic Vape or Cigarette
Next we have to focus on the insides, first remove the clear plastic completely, pull the sticky piece off the side too and give it a rince ready for recycling.
Separating The Plastic Disassembling Lost Mary or Bloody Mary Disposable Electronic Vape or Cigarette
We can now disconnect the battery wires. I always start from the positive side as there is only one wire, cut that away.
Cutting Wires Away From Battery Disassembling Lost Mary or Bloody Mary Disposable Electronic Vape or Cigarette
You can see on the negative side they use a confusing mix of red and black wires, as you have already disconnected the positive side it should be safe to cut through both to disconnect the battery completely.
Battery Disconnected Disassembling Lost Mary or Bloody Mary Disposable Electronic Vape or CigaretteBattery Disconnected Disassembling Lost Mary or Bloody Mary Disposable Electronic Vape or Cigarette
Pull apart the material that contains the liquid and snip the wires as shown below to separate them.
Finishing Up Disassembling Lost Mary or Bloody Mary Disposable Electronic Vape or Cigarette
Pull them all apart and you should now have all parts separated.
Finishing Up Disassembling Lost Mary or Bloody Mary Disposable Electronic Vape or Cigarette
Dispose of the hard plastic pieces and metal case in the recycling. Take the battery to a battery recycling collection point and the wires and components to a waste electrical recycling point. The rubber parts you can recycle in some places but not all accept them. The other material parts you may just have to throw in the bin.
End Result From Disassembling Lost Mary or Bloody Mary Disposable Electronic Vape or Cigarette
Electronic vapes have been around for a while now and are a good way to move away from smoking cigarettes (though it may introduce other health issues). The reuseable vapes are great, you can charge them up and add whichever flavour liquid you fancy with the amount of nicotine required. However, the rise in popularity of vapes have introduced a monster with “disposable” electronic vapes or cigarettes appearing over the last year or two in a big way. These things are extremely bad for the environment then the low cost, bright colours and range of sweet flavours makes them very attractive to children. For those reasons, in my opinion, it should be illegal to make and sell these disposable devices.
Environmental Impact
I live in Greater London and at the moment I can guarentee that if you walk down any street you are very likely to find one of these devices disguarded on the pavement, in the road, on the grass verge etc. I even went for a visit to a seaside location and the beach was littered with these! On the envronmental side nobody seems able to dispose of these properly, its much easier to chuck it out of your car window or put it in the general waste than work out how to dispose of it correctly. If you do try to take it apart to recycle the various components it isn’t an easy task as we shall show below. Do they get recycled if they are put in battery recycling collection points?
The e-cigarette casings contain a mixture of plastic, rubber and metal which when broken down turn into microplastics and chemicals which pollute waterways and be bad for wildlife. The vape liquid contains various substances such as nicotine, propylene glycol, vegetable glycerine, and flavourings which can be toxic to the environment on their own when disguarded. The largest issue to me is the lithium-ion battery which contains hazardous substances such as lead and mercury. The lithium contained in e-cigarette batteries is not just an environmental and public health hazard when discarded, but a precious natural resource that must be conserved, reused, and recycled. The ten tons of lithium discarded in vapes yearly in the U.K. alone is enough to construct 1,200 electric vehicles. Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency estimates the world will face lithium shortages by 2025. With that in mind I’ve taken a few pictures of what is happening to these devices on our streets:
Discarded e-cigarette kerbside crushed by vehicleDiscarded e-cigarette kerbside crushed by vehicle
Damaged Vapes Recycled
Here are a few disposable vapes I found damaged in the road that I attempted to take apart into their recyclable components. I’ll go into various vape types and how to take them apart later on but these ones took a bit more effort than normal as the outside cases were squashed but I managed to get them apart:
Damaged Disposable Vapes Found In RoadDisposable Vapes Found In Road Taken Apart Into Recyclable Components
How to disassemble the various types of disposable Vape
Here I have linked a new page to show you how to disassemble each type of vape so that you can break it down into components to recycle. Just a warning that the batteries can still carry an electrical charge and can be dangerous still so if you are not confident then I would recommend you put the whole thing into battery recycling rather than try to break it down yourself first.
Discord has some functionality built in called a Webhook which allows you to get automated messages and data updates sent to a text channel. One of the main things I use Webhooks for is to read calendar events from Google Calendar, send the event to a text channel 15minutes before it starts and ping Discord roles that may be interested in that event. In this guide I attempt to show you step by step how to set that up and the good news is that it is completely free to use.
We will be using the three platforms shown below: – Google Calendar – IFTTT – Discord
Once there, sign into your google account or register if you are new. Then on the left, next to Other calendars, click the plus sign to add other calendars.
Google Calendar – Add Other Calendars
Then go to Create new calendar on the drop down menu.
Google Calendar – Create New Calendar
Lets leave the calendar there for a minute and jump over to IFTTT, IFTTT is a site that helps you automate processes and it allows you to have a certain number of applets running for free. https://ifttt.com/explore
Register or log in to IFTTT then hit create at the top right and then we need to configure it to connect to the services. Where it says “If This” click “Add” and type google calendar into the search. You then need to pick “Any event starts”, this will look for events starting on your calendar. You should then be able to pick your Google Calendar Account, pick the calendar you have just created and select the time you want to trigger this, for online gaming stuff etc I normally go for 15mins or 30mins to give people warning that something is happening soon. If its a real life meet up you may want to trigger it a day or two before the event.
The next part we need to configure on IFTTT is the “Then That” but we need to set up the webhook in Discord first. On Discord, right click your server then go to Server Settings -> Integrations. Then on webhooks go to view webhooks and click “New Webhook”. This should create one, you can name it and pick which text channel it should post the event information on. Then all you need to do is copy the Webhook URL and we can go back to finalising our IFTTT settings.
On IFTTT “Then That” click “Add” and type “webhook” into the seach box. Pick webhook then click “make a search request”. In the URL box paste in the URL you copied from Discord. Set method to post, content type should be set to application/json and in body type what you want the message to be when the event starts, something like this:
{"content":"Our {{Title}} event is due to start in 15 minutes! {{Description}}"}
Doing that will pull the title and description from the Google Calendar entry automatically!
IFTTT Then That Setup
Once you have clicked create action that is the IFTTT setup complete. Click continue and finish on IFTTT, you can change the title of the applet if you want to. Now all you need to do is add some events to your Google Calendar and test that it works!
Bonus – With a little more setup you can make it automatically ping or tag Discord roles at the same time. In the above we added the {{Description}} part to IFTTT, this will relay whatever is in that description box on the google calendar event. We will use this to put the role information in. First thing you need to do is go to discord and check you have set it into developer mode. Go to settings -> Advnaced then toggle the developer mode setting to turn it on. Then you should be able to right click your server, go to settings -> roles and right click the role you want to ping and click copy ID.
Discord Copy Role ID
Now if you paste that it will give you a load of random numbers like 513344460535674883. This on its own will not work but if you put it in the proper syntax <@& 513344460535674883 > then it should. Simply paste that into the description box of the event and it will ping that roll before the event starts.
Discord Text Message produced from Google Calendar via IFTTT
Discord allows you to post messages from other websites and apps using Webhooks which is really useful, in the past I’ve used it from IFTTT and also linked into google calendar to share messages between them. What do you do if you want to get a webhook to ping roles or users at the same time it posts a message?
Well you need to use a special syntax to mention channels/users/roles etc in a webhook. For channels and users you should be able to use <@CHANNELID> and <@USERID>. To grab the IDs you need to go to settings->advanced then turn on developer mode. Once you have done that just right click a user or channel and hit “Copy ID”. Just paste it with the above so it looks something like <@684309756589074816>.
For roles its a similar approach to the above but you need to use <@&ROLEID> to get it working. You can also use it for other things like emojis if you need to for any reason! It took me a while to work it out so thought I would post here and I hope this helps someone.
First of all a disclaimer, if you don’t know what you are doing with electricity or are not sure then its always best to get an electrician to do the work or check the work for you before you turn it on as it can kill or injure you.
Now I am a qualified electronic engineer so know how to deal with things at component level but sometimes I have to dabble with electrical items too and am not so competent. For this task I had to install a small single pole type C Miniature Circuit Breaker (MCB) as one of my projects and had a few problems at first understanding which way around to wire it as the manufacturers documentation didn’t say and the device had no indication on it except for a small symbol here:
Chint 2A Type C MCB Operation Symbol Line and Load
What does the electrical MCB symbol mean?
Now some of you electrician types are probably saying “ah thats easy, you are a fool if you don’t know what that means and shouldn’t even be touching electricity”. Well you may be right but the good news is that I worked it out and thought it worth sharing as the internet wasn’t too helpful on this. So the top bit is showing a little lever with an X – This is a switch, the big on/off blue thing you can see in the photo above. Great thats one part but what do the two bits below mean and then onto the important question, how do I wire it? Well the next item down shows a square/rectangle symbol, this is the symbol for a thermal device. So its detecting if there is too much curent and when there is it will get too hot and will do something. The final piece of the puzzle is the curve half-circle like symbol underneith, this is actually the symbol for the circuit breaker itself. So the image tells us a nice little story, when the switch is on, it will be letting current through to the thermal sensor and if too much current goes through it will produce heat which will cause that curve to fire away like a rocket which will break the circuit and flip the switch off.
How do I wire it? Which way around does it go? Is line 1 and load 2 or is it the other way around?
Well the MCB will trip if the current exceeds its limit whichever way around you wire it but saying that they do have a correct way around to wire in. There are a few holes on your MCB that will expel heat etc if there is a short circuit, if its wired the wrong way around these will not work when the circuit trips. On this particular circuit breaker which is a Chint 2A Type C MCB you need to have the line or supply going to 1 with the load on 2 I.e. the line going into the top and the load out the bottom. Why can’t they write that on the datasheet?
Here are some of the terms I typed into search to try to find an answer on this:
Got youself a new ESP-32 development board and wondering how you talk to it? The good news is that someone has done a lot of the hard work required to set up ESP-32 support in the Arduino IDE. The first thing we need to do is add the board manager files so that settings and boards relating to ESP-32 show up in the Arduino IDE. Go to File -> Preferences then enter https://dl.espressif.com/dl/package_esp32_index.json into the “Additional Board Manager URLs” field:
Adding ESP-32 additional boards manager to Arduino IDE
Note: if you already have the ESP8266 boards URL, you can separate the URLs with a comma in the above.
Open boards manager. Go to Tools > Board > Boards Manager…
Search for ESP32 and press install button for the “ESP32 by Espressif Systems“ and hit install:
Installing ESP-32 Board In The Boards Manager
Select your Board in Tools > Board menu (in my case it’s the DOIT ESP32 DEVKIT V1)
Plug in the ESP-32 with USB cable to your computer.
Select the Port (if you don’t see the COM Port in your Arduino IDE) (tools->port).
Open the following example under File > Examples > WiFi (ESP32) > WiFi Scan
Testing Your ESP-32 By Opening the WIFI Scan Example Project
Press the Upload button in the Arduino IDE. Wait a few seconds while the code compiles and uploads to your board. When it says connecting…… press the boot button on the board and release. If that didn’t work hold the boot button before you press upload and release when it says connecting. I’ve even had some dev boards that need the enable button pressed instead, doing one of these will work, you just have to find which one.
ESP-32 In The IDE Waiting For Boot Button Press
If everything went as expected, you should see a “Done uploading.” message.
ESP-32 Done Uploading In The Arduino IDE
Finally just open the Arduino IDE Serial Monitor at a baud rate of 115200 and hey presto you should see it scaning for WIFI networks. You may need to press enable/reset button first:
Testing The ESP-32 Using WIFI Scan On The Serial Monitor
