alt Hacker NewsWhat I don't understand is why it took you 8 weeks to distinguish a timer from a transistor. That doesn't make your professor's reaction alright, I just find it puzzling.
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That would be like exposing a first year CS student to a situation where "it could be a compiler bug" is one of the potential explanations.
I would assume that you don't have access to the lab(and diagnostic equipment) at all times and taking other classes.
Also him being a student, having the wrong component was probably not in his mental troubleshooting tree. I would guess that it was not in the lab assistant's troubleshooting tree either.
Also once you start down the road of troubleshooting, a false trail can lead you far into the woods.
Same package. 555 is typically a DIP-8, transistor packages are available in the same. So you would have to examine the cryptic markings and compare them with the other students, and that’s only if you suspected some fuckup on the part of the knowledgeable people.
Ohm lordy, we're blaming the student for not having years of homebrew experience before he entered school? Sure any hobbiest knows what a 555 is, but when the lab assistant doesn't even catch it and the chip was handed out to the student this is not an entry-level students fault.
relatively cheap lesson in the importance of knowing your hardware.
You can create a timer with one transistor and an LC feedback loop.
It's a good question! I didn't think to check the markings on the chip. The lab tech was convinced I was doing something wrong with my setup, and likewise he had me convinced it must be something wrong with my setup.
Coincidentally, I've been knee-deep in some problems that I've applied the Cynefin framework to. I'd call this problem "chaotic", where throwing things at the wall might be _more_ effective than working down a suggested or tried-and-true path from an expert. I was pleasantly surprised just a few weeks ago where one of the more junior engineers on my team suggested updating a library - something I hadn't considered at all - to fix an issue we were having. (That library has no changelog; it's proprietary / closed source with no public bug tracker.) Surely enough, they were right, and the problem went away immediately - but I was convinced this was a problem with the data (it was a sporadic type error), not a library problem.