Woah
@TNT_error, the StemPod looks *huge* on that mod! I prefer small mods but when it comes to the overall mod + atty proportions, with the Splinter, iHeat and StemPod I find it looks better on a fat mod... but then it's less portable, more something I would use around the house or bringing to parties, but not at work or on the street etc.
My goal is really the opposite: I'm all for miniaturization. The Nomad is the proof that the heater can be ultra small. We just can't really reduce the stem length much as we need it for cooling. Maybe by using a cooling spiral or similar apparatus we could reduce it further, but there are drawbacks.
I'm convinced we could have something that is around or under 10cm tall (3.93 inch), mod, attachment and stem included.
I took a picture of my mods fitted with various attachments to illustrate the wide size variation they have, from impractically short to silly tall:
From left to right we have:
- The Witcher fitted with a custom attachment based on the Kennedy 24 RDA. This is the smallest working size I managed to achieve but vapor path is way too short and by using 810 drip tips as stems you can only micro dose (and not even mini dose, really ridiculous! it's okay for a couple of ninja hits but you would be better of vaping e-liquid or concentrates in that case)
- The eLeaf Pico 75W fitted with the CeraWax attachment. Looks like your regular e-cig, but we'll never manage to have convection working in that form factor. For a dry herb conduction attachment of similar size, I invite you to check the Divine Tribe thread.
- The SmoAnt Knight v2 fitted with the Project Pure SF using standard taper 14mm stems. It's great but we could go even shorter I'm sure.
- The evic VTC mini fitted with a custom attachment based on the Fishbone RDA and a 14mm wooden stem I got from the MistVape Touch. That stem is too short though, vapor is hot on this one.
- The evic Primo mini fitted with a custom attachment based on a Fishbone variant. This one looks a bit like a long antenna but it's in fact shorter than the Project Pure SF already. Inside the Knight it's way better.
- The Steam Engine DNA75 fitted with the iHeat. Damn that's tall!
- The VapeDynamics Duo (crap) fitted with another custom attachment based on the Fishbone Plus RDA (or something like that, forgot the name)
- Then the FlowerMate Aura Hybrid X fitted with the Project Eraser version, to illustrate what we clearly don't want!
If we look only at the mods, the eLeaf Pico 75W is clearly the winner when it comes to size. But it only accepts small diameter attachments due to the battery cap (check the Pico 20700 though it accepts larger diameters!) Tall attys also look completely out of place and unprotected on it. The aspect ratio only works with standard e-cig sized attys.
The evic VTC mini is small too, albeit actually slightly taller than the Primo mini, but both tend to give a "thin and tall" impression. The Witcher is absurdly wide, it's almost as wide as the Steam Engine but it has a single cell where the latter has two! I also don't like its design much and it weights too much.
The right part of the Pico is about as small as we can get if we stick to 18650's. Smaller cells have poor characteristics anyway and are much less widespread. A 18650 is 65mm tall, so we can't expect much less than 70mm if we include the contacts, 75mm would be even more realistic (the Pico is 70mm so it's possible) That translates to 2.76inch in your barbaric unit.
In the Knight v2 the circuit board is pretty short. Buttons are on the front and the screen is on the side. I didn't open it though, but if it was not discontinued (I think it is) we could use that circuit as a base, as the stock TC implementation is great out of the box and there's nothing to configure (just enter the TCR value and set the temperature)
The Pico circuit is small though. In this picture you can see a Chinese clone Pico board which costs under $10 shipped. I believe the original Pico PCB are exactly the same dimension (plural because there are two stacked PCB)
That clone board is unfortunately not really an option: it doesn't mount as a USB device, so we can't flash it easily with NFEtoolbox etc. I lifted the small OLED hoping to identify the MCU below but the package is completely blank, no markings nor grinding marks. So there's little hope we can easily program it and it's probably crap hardware overall anyway. It does TC for a few coil materials but probably as bad as the stock joyetech/eleaf/wismec implementation.
But for $25 shipped we can get the Pico dual and maybe salvage its board and contacts. It's fully supported by AF and with some work my_evic/tubo_evic could be ported to it. The screen is small though, can't display much on it...
https://www.fasttech.com/products/3...hentic-eleaf-pico-dual-200w-tc-vw-apv-box-mod
That's still way cheaper than DNA boards (and you get a full mod for that price not just a chipset!) On that subject, maybe we could look into other DNA variants and not just the DNA75/75C and DNA250/250C? We don't need that many Watts anyway no? The DNA60 is super small for instance and comes with either a small or a large screen:
https://www.evolvapor.com/products/dna60
Don't know how well it performs though...
I think we would be better off using a chipset that we can fully reprogram, like any of the mods supported by ArticFox. It would give us more control. The best would be to get rid of the 510 port completely, as it's the Achilles's heel of these systems anyway. That's what
@funkyjunky did for the Tubo in fact: he chose the cheap and ubiquitous evic VTC mini as a base, built a custom heater and custom software to drive it, and enclosed the whole thing in CNC'ed wood. Brilliant!
. I blame this recent lost of control on you
