Doin' It with a 555: One Chip to Rule Them All (aashvik.com)

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.

Obligatory

https://youtu.be/mDhNQPt8An0?si=VlzHWK4Cxcxn9pSK

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.

I want to build an atari punk console with a 555 to learn basic soldering and electronics, fun stuff

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.

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.

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.

Have to love the tone of the article.

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.

In the same voice as saying that some language is Turing complete, we can now say that an electronic component is 555 complete.

That’s why the Beach Boys made a song about the 409, the predecessor chip.

The 555 figured prominently in a digital circuits course I took back in the mid-80s. It was into its second decade of existence by that point, and it's still going strong.

Depends what you want to achieve; from fundamental educational point of view it is not a good device, too high level; most of the stuff you can build with 555 you can do with standard BJTs, and you'd be able in fact in understand how it works. To me, 555 is good only for dumbed down entertaintment, not true learning.

> Doin’ It With A 555: One Chip to Rule Them All

> We also know that microcontrollers implement logic gates – AND, OR, NOT, NAND, etc. But you don’t have to deal with those complicated logic functions, or worse, the software that runs on those microcontrollers. Get down to brass tacks and use hardware (555 ICs and 555 timer ICs, to name a few the only important ones) that just works!

Come on, you haven't even described how to implement combinational logic using 555 timer chips. Just show us how to build NAND, please.

The ‘birthplace’ of the 555 is in downtown Sunnyvale - an easy trip if you’re in the Valley*. It’s in an alley between Murphy Ave. and the parking lot off S. Frances. There’s a realtor’s office opposite the side entrance to Fashion Wok. That’s the place.

It was invented by Hans Camenzind**, who was doing contract work for Signetics in an office he rented there. What a great location for your office, even back then!

There really should be a plaque or something.

* Go there then have dinner at Dishdash, across the street.

** RIP - he died in 2012, but his web site is still up: http://www.designinganalogchips.com/

I'm really looking forward to the LLM results of all these posts.

I won 2011's "555 Timer Contest" artistic category. As a bonus I got a phone call from Hans Camenzind, who offered to design a custom chip (for free) to perform the same function.

LeDominoux vid: https://youtu.be/PQOjkuJtBfM?si=pS9Qloekm7JJKCoE

555 contest archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20120121212136/http://www.555cont...

Wait, so this is not April fool's? I read April 1st and bolted.