Vapes are bad for your body and definitely bad for the planet; the world’s landfills are stuffed with disposable vape cartridges. But now there’s a way to give all that e-waste a more pleasant tune.
The Vape Synth is a project created by a group of makers in New York City who break apart spent Elf Bar nicotine vaporizers and hack them into digital musical instruments. The resulting device still looks like a vape cartridge, but with a small speaker nestled amid an array of lights and buttons. To play it, you put your mouth on it and draw your breath inward, like you would on a vape.
Think of it like a digital ocarina. The Vape Synth repurposes the vaporizer’s existing low-pressure sensor. By sucking wind through the sensor—maybe it’s a reverse digital ocarina—you trigger an oscillator circuit and generate an audio signal. Pressing the buttons triggers different tones. The noises that come out are, frankly, screechy and chaotic. (This is what it sounds like.)
The people who made the Vape Synth know it sounds goofy. That’s the point.
“We started from a very silly place,” says Kari Love, one of Vape Synth’s creators. “We have to use the low pressure sensor. Which means to play it, you must suck.”
Love and David Rios are professors at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Shuang Cai is a PhD student at Cornell University and teaches at NYU and Cornell. They are all self-described salvage hoarders and makers who work on the Vape Synth project under the moniker Paper Bag Team. (None of them vape nicotine.)
The three have presented the Vape Synth in talks like the Open Hardware Summit and run workshops to build them at events like the 2025 Low Tech Electronics Faire. Another workshop was held this past weekend at the hacker collective NYC Resistor in Brooklyn. The team also just released a thorough guide via Instructables on how to hack your very own vapes into synths.
“They’re this huge e-waste product,” Love says of spent vapes. “You see them everywhere. They have the lithium ion batteries, which makes them particularly insidious in the disposable tech world.”
When Juul, once the king of vapes, was ordered by the FDA to pull its product from US markets, it cleared the way for other—entirely disposable—vape devices to flood the shelves. The already multi-billion-dollar vape business exploded, with devices pouring in from countries like China and birthing dozens of brands with names like SoundCloud rap song titles. (Pillow Talk, Hyppe Bar, PolkaDot, Puff Bar.)
These colorful devices filled with flavored nicotine juice are all disposable; they wind up in the trash after a few thousand puffs. Vape recycling is basically nonexistent in the US. All the plastic, circuitry, and batteries inside the vape just go to waste—unless you salvage them.
“The juice goes out, but then you have this charging circuit, the battery,” Cai says. “Everything in there is still perfectly fine.”
The team was inspired by hacker Andrew Quitmeyer’s deliberately goofy Bubble Punk philosophy, which argues that if you take something serious like waste reduction and make it a little funny and silly, it keeps the concept approachable and more people will participate.
“This process is upstream salvage,” Cai says. “The idea is not that we want to use this as a solution to the existing status quo, but to use this to call for attention and encourage more creative action on these kinds of issues.”
Love says the project started when a student came to her asking for a way to make a miniature fog machine. Love’s first thought was to take apart and repurpose a vape, but then the student never returned and she was left with a disassembled device on her desk. Love then talked about it with Rios, who teaches a class about new musical interfaces. They collaborated with Cai, a fellow tinkerer, with the idea of turning the vape into a makeshift musical instrument.
“Ideally, we would change that paradigm and make less waste,” Love says. “But while we’re making that much waste, let’s divert some of it. Let’s use it.”
Paper Bag Team’s instructions recommend making the synths out of one specific, very popular vape: the Elf Bar, aka the EB BC5000, a Chinese-made vape that has sold millions of units in the US. (While you can use models made by Leaf Bar or Lost Mary, they’re not recommended for this hack as the internal parts can be slightly different.)
The blueprints from Paper Bag use the vape’s original batteries, charging circuit with LED, and case. The first step of the process of vape repurposing is to put on some gloves, because nicotine can be absorbed through the skin. After that, the instructions spell out how to add speakers and controls and move the low pressure sensor closer to the mouthpiece so it can be activated after the holes for the musical components have been drilled elsewhere in the case.
The Vape Synth’s tonal quality is a bit lacking. I found that it sort of sounds like a dying rabbit or swarm of flies hitting a bug zapper nonstop. Love says the team is already working on another version of the Vape Synth with a wider musical range that can also be used as a MIDI controller, and therefore able to trigger more pleasing sounds.
Rios says people shouldn’t be intimidated by the idea of poking and prodding their electronics.
“People feel just completely unempowered to do anything,” Rios says. “Even the most basic thing of just popping the lid open to see what’s in there. You don’t even have to touch it. It can be fun and easy and you can hopefully apply that to your other e-waste, or at least get interested.”
The Paper Bag Team are all careful to credit other fellow makers like artist Sebastian Bidegain, who built a Vape camera; maker Becky Stern’s efforts to reuse vape batteries; and Disengineering, an art collective that turned vapes into microphones. Part of the goal of running workshops and putting the DIY instructions online is to encourage people to find their own ways to repurpose e-waste.
“There’s no way that the three of us are going to have all the ideas,” Rios says.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: wired.com
