Digital pregnancy tests are almost as powerful as the original IBM PC

guest · Sep 4, 2020

Digital pregnancy tests are almost as powerful as the original IBM PC
September 4, 2020
https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2020/9/4/21422628/digital-pregnancy-test-teardown-processor-ram-ibm-pc

regnancy tests used to be fairly simple sticks you peed on, but the move to digital versions has transformed them into tiny computers almost as powerful as the original IBM PC. Fascinated by the digital era of pregnancy tests, Twitter users foone and xtoff recently pulled apart examples from Walmart and Clearblue to reveal what’s really going on inside.

Each test, which costs less than $5, includes a processor, RAM, a button cell battery, and a tiny LCD screen to display the result. The processor is an 8-bit Holtek microcontroller with 64 bytes of RAM, capable of running at either 4Mhz or 8Mhz depending on the battery configuration. That might sound very basic, but the chip is surprisingly complicated.

“You might think it’s very limited because it’s only got 64 bytes of RAM, but it’s actually using a pipelined architecture to operate at 1 instruction per cycle, giving it quite good performance for a 4Mhz CPU,” explains Foone in a fascinating Twitter thread.
Click to expand...

Foone speculates that this device is “probably faster at 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 operated at 5Mhz. The difference here is that this is a pregnancy test you pee on and then throw away.

I’d recommend reading foone’s full Twitter thread as it’s a fascinating teardown.
Click to expand...

So, with it open, we've got a single PCB here.
There's some kind of pill-looking thing to the left, a little LCD screen, and a I can see a battery on the other side. pic.twitter.com/WsuPI3pVsb
— foone (@Foone) September 4, 2020
Click to expand...

Rasheed187 · Sep 5, 2020

Wow, I seriously didn't know about this, this is news to me.

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Digital pregnancy tests are almost as powerful as the original IBM PC

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Digital pregnancy tests are almost as powerful as the original IBM PC

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