alt Hacker NewsDoin' It with a 555: One Chip to Rule Them All
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When I was in college I was not in an engineering program but I was self-learning electronics. I was trying to learn to use a 555 timer to do something and couldn't get it to work.
So I went to the office hours of a random EE professor thinking they would help me out. Instead I got scolded about how 555 timers are not real engineering and that I shouldn't waste his time.
I never used a 555 timer ever since.
That’s why the Beach Boys made a song about the 409, the predecessor chip.
I designed the electronics for a heavy-duty industrial 3D printer and used a 555 in the failsafe circuit (alongside the manual e-stop). If it didn't get reset by a heartbeat from the embedded computer/software, it would unpower the heaters and actuators.
In the same voice as saying that some language is Turing complete, we can now say that an electronic component is 555 complete.
The 555 is a versatile little thing. I used it at university for a simple circuit which allowed an arduino to cut it’s own power for 5 minutes and then boot again.
Have to love the tone of the article.
I want to build an atari punk console with a 555 to learn basic soldering and electronics, fun stuff
The late Harold DuBose of Spectra-Physics, repeatedly used 555's as power inverters in the electronic design of a frequency stabilized ring dye laser. He liked the strength of the output transistor.
Obviously TFA is satire/tongue in cheek and while you can do all sorts of awesome stuff with a 555 you can't patch those implementations without physically rewiring them which in many cases means throwing out the board and fabbing a new one, whereas a microcontroller-based board can often be fixed with a simple jtag debugger.
So, yeah, 555 timers are cool and doing things with analog ICs is groovy but there's a reason everyone just stuffs a small microcontroller in places where we used to just stuff a 555, and it's maintainability.
I built one from discrete transistors in a lab class in college, on a breadboard. Fun times debugging and getting it to work. Then I flashed an led with it right next to another led flashed from a 555 chip. With the same discrete timer caps, the flashing frequencies were different due to the extra parasitics in the breadboard discrete 555 version. So had to compensate the caps to make the flashes match each other's frequency.