- A couple of years ago I used a 555 in an attempt to fix a problem I had with my Xiegu G90 ham radio. When sending CW (morse code), the radio would sometimes not see a "dit" (the short tone in morse code). I could reproduce it by tapping the paddle too quickly. My theory is that the G90 doesn't use interrupts to detect paddle presses, but rather polls those lines, and sometimes misses when a pulse happens completely in between polls. I made a little circuit using a 555, where the dit side triggers the 555 and closes the dit line just long enough to always be picked up by the G90, but short enough to never cause two dits (at least not at the speed I was going at). I didn't bother doing the same for the dah side, because apparently my index finger is slower than my thumb and the problem never came up there. It worked flawlessly, but only when not transmitting. As soon as RF got involved, it behaved weirdly. I tried adding ferrite beads, but it didn't solve it. In the end I never used it, and just learned to not slap the dits so fast, but it was a fun experience and see the 555 work.
More details: https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/1eo9ki7/xiegy...
- 5:55 video released on May 5th, as per description :)
For something feeling like a fairly specific IC, I remember seeing many projects that use it throughout the years in wacky ways - and seeing it makes me happy to know that the sentiment for this little piece is shared.
- Big Clive is currently livestreaming to celebrate the 555's birthday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzNjFJdaw_I
by PhaseLockk
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- You can learn about the origin of the 555 timer from its creator in his free book here: http://www.designinganalogchips.com/
Fun fact: his original concept needed 9 pins and therefore was going be forced to have a 14 pin package. A late epiphany got it down to the 8 pin version we know today.
by SoleilAbsolu
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- I still have the Forrest Mims III Radio Shack "555 Engineer's Mini-Notebook" somewhere in my basement. And rumor has it that Sammy Hagar can't drive 555 because his car just isn't fast enough!
by JKCalhoun
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- Evil Mad Scientist makes a giant, discrete version as a soldering kit:
https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/tinykitlist/6...
Very cool. (Looks like it uses 26 transistors. I assume the die is similar.)
- As a kid I didn’t understand what the 555 timer chip on the Apple II disk controller was doing but I learned the hard way that when you misalign the pins on the drive connector cable and the 555 chip releases its blue smoke you can’t use the drive anymore :(
by davidwritesbugs
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- Oh god I feel old. I remember being an excited schoolboy thinking how magic this was when it debuted.
- Built an atari punk console using these with my late father. Still have it hanging on my wall in a shadow box.
- Another allrounder and close cousin in time and but with much more functionality is the 4046 CMOS Phase Locked Loop.
It can be configured as a versatile oscillator like the 555, but it can also implement an FM modulator / demodulator, a FSK modem, a tone discriminator, a clock multiplier, a phase detector, a voltage to frequency and frequency to voltage converter a speed control loop and much more.
Not bad for a $1 chip. My circuits professor always carried a bunch in his lab coat pocket and handed them out like candy almost everyone anyone needed a circuit to do something to do with oscillation.
- I used one of these to win an inter-school science competition when I was ~13. It was a minute timer. The competition board doubted I had built it all myself, so they plonked it down in front of me and demanded I draw the circuit diagram in front of them.
- The 555 timer is still the most popular chip that hobbyists add to their parts inventory (see rankings at https://partsbox.com/ecdb.html). I find this both interesting and curious — I'd say it has mostly nostalgic value at this point. Almost every practical problem today is better solved by something else. And yet it persists, I guess mostly because of beginner tutorials and first LED blinky circuits.
One nice thing about the 555 is that at least it aged well and still is very usable in those beginner tutorials. Unlike for example the uA741 which no one should use.
- I got lucky I saw and screenshot when this had 222 points with 55 comments.
<http://ibb.co.com/1Y7QFB8N>
- I was on my college fencing team. One summer, I had an internship at HP and they paired me with a grizzled old hardware designer, Fred, as a mentor to build a summer project. Fred had a lab bench with drawers overflowing with old resistors, caps, ICs, and even some tubes (“Fred, what the hell are you going to use those for?” “You never know. Tubes might come back!”). Fred had once accepted a promotion to be a manager and quickly renounced it because he hated it and just wanted to design hardware. I decided to build the electronic scoring system used in fencing matches. Our school had one professional system, but I figured I could replicate it for a lot less money. It was all based on a couple of 555s, some 74-series TTL counters, a few LEDs, buttons, and a speaker. Fred was the guy who showed me how a 555 worked. I built it, it worked, and the school used it for at least a year or two after I left. Happy memories. God bless Fred, wherever he is.
- also today's date is 5.5. and the video is 5m55s
- I have a Displate of a decapped 555 hanging near my EE workbench:
https://displate.com/displate/2002057
- Back when radio shack still existed I would buy a 555 timer during every visit. I live collecting them and still have a bunch somewhere stored. I continue to do it with the 328p arduino boards as well whenever I visit my local microcenter.
by stackghost
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- When I was a camp counselor in my 20s I designed a one-octave "piano" out of one of these, a battery, paperclips for keys, and a shitload of resistors. We had the kids build them on proto board. They sounded harsh but you could play Mary Had a Little Lamb on them!
- Can't watch it right now, but upvoted for Dave Jones. He's taught me so much. Absolute treasure, and the host of one of the last great active forums. Thank you for not blackholing all that info on the disaster that is Discord, like so many other communities.
- As an electronics-enthusiast kid in the 70's, just before home computers showed up at all, I wished the 555 was for Time Travel
- What component values do you need to time exactly 55 years?
Maybe it could work if you used 5 timers?
- !remindme 500 years
- Time to slow it down to lower frequencies and give it more frequent checkups.
- Just another 500 years to go. I missed the beginning, probably will miss that last milestone as well.
- killer oneshot, laughed hard..
- The late Harold DuBose use to use the 555 as a power inverter as it could sink 200ma at the laser companies he worked for. Convenient and cheap.
- And the topic had 55 comments when I first looked at it
- I used to get exited about this. Hahaha I think I miss those days.
- The schfive-five-five is schfifty-five! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-XccUMOQ978
(I just made half y'all crash out with old internet nostalgia. The rest of you are like "huh?")
by raverbashing
2 subcomments
- Makes me wonder if we could have a 555 circuit with a trigger time of 55 yrs
by robofanatic
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- and this is the fifth comment
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