A vape that runs DOOM? Sounds like a fever dream from a tech enthusiast’s late night Reddit scroll, but Aaron Christophel made it real with the PIXO Aspire, a $35 vaping kit that’s more than just a nicotine delivery system. This tiny device, with its 323×173 pixel touchscreen and Puya PY32F403XC microcontroller based on a Cortex-M4 core, can almost run DOOM natively.
Vapes are supposed to heat liquid, produce vapor and maybe display a few settings on a screen. But the PIXO Aspire exceeds expectations. The Puya microcontroller has enough oomph to do complex tasks. With 16 MB of external SPI Flash storage and a touchscreen display, the hardware screams potential beyond its intended use. There’s also a vibration motor for haptic feedback and an unused Bluetooth Low-Energy chip, so the maker never activated some features.
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Running DOOM natively would have been ideal but one obstacle stood in the way: the Puya chip’s tiny 64 kB of SRAM. DOOM, despite its lean design for 1993 PCs, needs more RAM to handle graphics, game logic and sound in real time. The processor and storage were enough but the SRAM bottleneck prevented a native port. Christophel wasn’t deterred, he came up with an ingenious solution: turn the vape into a little secondary display for a PC running DOOM.
Christophel had to write new firmware which is available on his GitHub site to turn the PIXO Aspire into a screensharing device. He used the vape’s USB port to connect to a PC and broadcast DOOM’s images on the 323×173 pixel touchscreen. A PC companion tool quickly grabs the game’s output, compresses it and sends it to the vape. What’s the result? You control DOOM with a mouse and keyboard on your computer and the action happens on the vape’s screen.
The PIXO Aspire’s firmware is a fortress, with an internal watchdog timer and an external hardware timer that will reboot the system if something goes wrong. These safety features designed to ensure safe vaping were a major obstacle. Christophel spent hours reverse engineering the system to figure out how the timers worked and how to prevent them from resetting his custom firmware. He succeeded and the vape is stable and DOOM is running.
What’s next in vape gaming? The PIXO Aspire’s unused Bluetooth chip could theoretically be used for wireless streaming or even multiplayer hacks. Future vapes might have more SRAM and native DOOM ports without the need for a PC. Manufacturers could market gaming vapes to a small, but vocal audience.
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