Learning About And Hacking Digital Pregnancy Tests

What Resides Inside When You Strip It Down

Hardware / software necromancer, collector of Weird Stuff, and maker of Death Generators Foone has been tweeting about electronic pregnancy tests over the long weekend and the results have been quite interesting.  A strip down of one reveals it is a standard paper pregnancy test with an 8-bit Holtek HT48C06 microcontroller, 64 bytes of RAM, 1024 words of ROM, and various lights, sensors and a display screen.  That makes the device every bit as accurate as a paper strip, with a digital display to make reading the results far easier.

Once cracked open, Foone decided to fill the void inside with upgraded hardware to see what else a pregnancy test could do.  First off was an animated  loop of the original Doom, which was quickly replaced with a playable version.  From there they created a number of retro animations up to and including sk_baby.max, which you should really check out on Twitter, @Foone.

There are a variety of projects you can check out, from amusing hacks such as this to far more technically challenging and useful software and hardware.  Take a peek if you are the type of person intrigued by this type of work.