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The 4-4-4 plan repurposing cheap stuff

The Dollar Store sometimes has stuff that can be re-purposed and used for other things. Paulorenato did this to make a dollar store voltmeter for under $4 that consumes less than 4 mA and (hopefully) last for at least 4 years – his 4-4-4 plan.

The goal was to construct a battery voltage monitor. a PIC microprocessor was used to convert between the battery voltage and the pedometer input. One of the interesting ideas was to use a red LED as a voltage regulator to replace the button cell the pedometer normally used for power. The PIC development environment used was the Microchip PICkit 2 rather than the PICaxe.

I am wondering how difficult it would be to reverse engineer the display interface so that it could be driven directly from the PIC rather than through the pedometer circuit.

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