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555 Timer Circuits

(www.555-timer-circuits.com)
280 points okl | 3 comments | 17 Oct 24 18:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.631s | source
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lmpdev ◴[19 Oct 24 23:15 UTC] No.41891546[source]▶
We sell kits with plenty of 555 timers (including some listed here)

It’s a shame that Arduino has effectively truncated kids learning with a full MCU as the “building block” of their learning

I see it also bite them in the arse with wasteful solutions. Often a BJT or power fet is all they need (say for a basic relay trigger). But if they aren’t presented with a shiny arduino compatible module explicitly designed for what they want, they get nervous

About half the kids I see make the intellectual jump, half end up not coming back

I do wish kids were taught basic soldering, it would make the learning process a lot less worrisome

The 555 and LM741 are still supreme learning tools. They are even simple enough to breadboard out with BJTs and analogue components. I’ve only seen a few extremely hardcore guys bother to conceptualise under the hood that deeply

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doe_eyes ◴[19 Oct 24 23:21 UTC] No.41891585[source]▶
> It’s a shame that Arduino has effectively truncated kids learning with a full MCU as the “building block” of their learning

Why? I think the vast majority of hobbyists used the 555 as a "black-box" chip. They now have a more intuitive, cheaper, and more power-efficient way of doing the same thing.

Pre-Arduino, learning electronics wasn't more profound. It was just less accessible. Nowadays, you have the same number of determined and talented hobbyists who eventually master some of the more arcane topics. You also have more people who learn just enough to get their art project done, and it's easier than it used to be... but why is that a bad thing?

There's a temptation to demand that others do things the hard way just because we had to. But is it healthy? I don't lament the demise of the 555 any more than I lament that the youth no longer knows how to put shoes on a horse.

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1. giantrobot ◴[19 Oct 24 23:56 UTC] No.41891779[source]▶
> There's a temptation to demand that others do things the hard way just because we had to. But is it healthy? I don't lament the demise of the 555 any more than I lament that the youth no longer knows how to put shoes on a horse.

I agree with both you and the GP. Arduinos tend to make goofing around with electronics more accessible to more people. At the same time a lot of projects could be built very simply with just a couple timer chips. It's unfortunate people reach for a relatively complex solution (Arduino etc) to what's ultimately a simple problem. They would benefit a great deal from just knowing a blinking light can be made very simply with a simple circuit.

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2. ryandrake ◴[20 Oct 24 00:31 UTC] No.41891939[source]▶
I liken it to people who reach for kubernets and docker and microservices and cloud infrastructure when a simple LAMP stack running on a single box will do. And people who reach for a hosted javascript app when a native one that doesn’t require internet will do. They’re not wrong, just unnecessarily complicating things because they learned how to do it the complicated way.
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3. giantrobot ◴[20 Oct 24 01:28 UTC] No.41892173[source]▶
I get what you're saying and I don't disagree but I don't know if the analogy works.

An Arduino is very approachable in that you can just plug it into a USB port and tell it to blink a light following a very simple tutorial. No breadboards even, just plug in a device and open a program. Under the hood the Arduino is very complex but for the end user it's very simple.

A lot of Arduino compatible modules are also simple for the end user despite being very complex under the hood.

The simplicity for the end user is I think the biggest attraction for the Arduino. In your K8s analogy, it is not simple for the end user. Someone may build some K8s monstrosity because that's what a tutorial or bootcamp taught but it's very obviously complex. The hosted JavaScript app is a better Arduino analogy, it's a complex solution under the hood but presents a relatively simple user experience.