Lithium "capacitor" in a disposable product

Such an odd twist on these vapour producing devices. This is apparently the MKII version of this product, and probably the last here due to the imminent ban of disposable versions.

I'd like to thank James for sending a picture of the circuitry in one of these. It looked interesting enough that I bought two for us to explore.

The design seems to have been optimised for machine manufacture with much less wiring and a PCB that separates the pressure sensor and the control chip. Annoyingly the chip seems to be an economy version without the internal charging circuitry, as it would have made recharging it much easier with the two pin heater connector.

The lithium cell in a capacitor style package is a bit scary to remove from the PCB, as there is a lot of ground plane metal in the vicinity of the positive connection so shorting it out would be quite easy - with the usual freaky lithium cell results. I recommend running the cell down to 3V before attempting removal, as the biggest hazard will be the potential stored energy.
A hot air gun for carefully melting both solder pads at once might be a viable option.

Although marked as being 360mAh I have run a few charge/discharge cycles and both cells took a charge of approximately 280mAh, so the capacity will be slightly less. That kinda fits the size of the package with the space taken up by the rubber plug at the lead end. It's close to half the original cell capacity, meaning the device will last half as long! The rival "crystal" version still seems to be using a 500mAh cell for much better run time.

All the prominent manufacturers of these devices have known that a ban was inevitable, and have had pod based rechargeable versions available for a while. I'm not sure why the shops continue to push the non rechargeable versions. I guess the imminent ban will fix that issue, ironically taking up LESS space on their shelves! It will also unfortunately mean the end of the glorious street-lithium era where the technical geeks would swoop on these discarded devices to harvest their lithium cells for projects.


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