Pregnancy tests were easily used by you as sticks, but going into the digital versions they made smaller IPMs. Can be as powerful as a PC. Influenced by the digital age of pregnancy tests, Twitter users Phone And xtoff I recently drew examples from Walmart and Clarlow to reveal what was really going on inside.
Each test, which costs less than 5, includes a processor, RAM, a button cell battery and a small LCD screen to show the result. The processor is an 8-bit Holtech microcontroller with 64 bytes of RAM, capable of running at 4 MHz or 8 MHz depending on the battery configuration. It sounds pretty basic, but the chip is surprisingly complex.
“You think it’s very limited because it only got 64 bytes of RAM, but it actually uses the pipeline architecture to operate at 1 instruction per cycle, giving a nice performance for a 4 MHz CPU,” he said. Foone explains In an interesting Twitter thread.
So, with that opening, we’ve got a single PCB here.
There’s a tablet-like thing on the left, a little LCD screen, and I can see the battery on the other. pic.twitter.com/WsuPI3pVsb– Phone (@ Phone) September 4, 2020
The phone speculates that the device is “faster in number crunching and basic I / O than the CPU used in the original IBM PC.” IBM’s original PC was based on Intel’s 8088 microprocessor, an 8-bit chip that runs at 5 MHz. The difference here is that this is a pregnancy test that you give birth to and then throw away.
You might assume that the addition of an LCD screen and processor to digitize this pregnancy test improves accuracy or modernizes how the test works, but it’s certainly not. This digital pregnancy test includes a strip of paper to measure the chemical reaction you create when urinating on a strip.
The inner strip of paper acts like a vat so that when it gets wet it activates the battery and powers the device. The device then uses three LEDs and two photosensors to read the lines on the paper strip that normally give a pregnancy test result. The processor, RAM, battery and LCD display paper strip literally exist for reading and improve test clarity by displaying “pregnant” or “not pregnant” on the display instead of the usual lines that can be difficult to read.
Unfortunately the chip inside is not programmable, so there is no possible way for people Doom To run on these digital pregnancy tests. I recommend reading Phono full Twitter thread Because it is an amazing volatile. While these digital pregnancy tests may seem like an incredible waste of plastics and electronics, I am only thankful that humanity has gone beyond injecting frogs with urine to test for pregnancy.
