hckrnws

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.

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.

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 used to salvage components from electronic stuff and was always looking out for 555s but never found any, in a whole range of vintages from 1970's to 2000's. I ended up with the same conclusion - it seemed to be a hobbyist's chip that real consumer products didn't use and felt amateurish for some reason I didn't understand.

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.

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

Do it. Build a couple, then build a simple opamp mixer (it's a single opamp and a handful of resistors, and a couple of capacitors across the power supply), and then - get adventurous - a PT2399 delay kit.

Then take a look on https://yusynth.net at some of the VCF designs, and build one of them.

You won't have a synthesizer, you'll have some crazy homebrew drone machine that you can make scary movie sountracks with.

Obligatory

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

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.

Two thoughts on situations where the 555 may be preferable, if anyone has experience how these compare :

1. Low-noise applications. I’d naively expect the 555 to be less noisy than a clocked digital microcontroller, though it’s been awhile since I’ve worked in this space.

2. Low power applications. How does latent power draw compare between a 555 and a typical low power microcontroller?

> Low power applications. How does latent power draw compare between a 555 and a typical low power microcontroller?

The 555 is very power hungry compared to a typical cheap low-power microcontroller. IIRC there are lower power variants but the 555 still fundamentally does timing by draining current through a resistor, which is going to result in losses.

And price. A PY32 is about $0.08 in quantity and can do a lot more than a 555 - which is at least 3 times more expensive...

and it comes with new set of problems: Now you need a FW guys to write and maintain software for it, then your hardware team may need to wait that FW guy to release software to test, or the FW guy need to wait hardware to test his software, etc.

Then in production, you need another stage to flash the FW, which add time and complexity.

Then security, cheap MCU usually has bad software protection, that means your software can be read out easily, not a big deal since the FW replacing the 555 would be dead simple anyway, but try to explain it to a non-technical CEO when he read about it on his morning's newspaper.

Puya? First time I hear of these things .. (having used ESP32, RPI Pico, Nordic and STM). Googling led me to OpenPuya https://py32.org/en/