Joule Thief made of a hacked digital pregnancy test

During the first time my wife was expecting, I had the idea to hack the old digital pregnancy test. Amazing! It´s a real photometer with a microcontroller and some reference measurement units, LEDs, phototransistors etc. based on the classic with antibodys working test stripe. The system just decide, "yes this is blue and not white
: you are pregnant". The urine will activate the whole circuit with an absorbing little disc made of a kind of porous ceramic.
The end of the story was the LCD Display driven with a Joule Thief. The circuit needs about 5µA and it shows all the time that the family is pregnant. And this for a very long time...
[The "Schwanger" is the German word for pregnant]

Видео Joule Thief made of a hacked digital pregnancy test канала Dr. Dampfpunk