Digital pregnancy testing sticks turn out to have very analogue internals when it comes to getting results • The Register
Updated A hacker has peered into a fancy digital pregnancy stick and found it is just a glorified analogue paper test strip with a screen added, a novel form of activation, and a larger price tag.Inspired by an earlier Twitter thread, hardware hacker (and floppy disc enthusiast) foone bought a pack of two digital pregnancy sticks for $7, whereas a pack of 25 paper-based ones costs about $9. Foone decided to pry into one of the sticks, and discovered it contained an 8-bit Holtek HT48C06 microcontroller with 64 bytes of RAM and 1024 words of ROM, a series of LED lights, photosensors, a cell battery, and a small rectangular screen.
The microcontroller onboard makes it seem fairly advanced, but at the core of is, well, one of those cheap paper tests.
The microcontroller onboard makes it seem fairly advanced, but at the core of is, well, one of those cheap paper tests.
The next stage of the project was to see if this could be beefed up a little. After adding a new processor and screen, foone turned the device into a gizmo that could display messages no one wants to see... ®
Comment