555 Timer Circuits

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

The problem with starting with a 555 timer is that the things you can make with a 555 timer aren’t impressive to kids anymore. Oh, you made a sound that gets higher pitched when there’s more light on it? I thought that shit was amazing when I was 8. But my son wouldn’t look twice at that. So we started with Arduino so that the first thing he created was something he saw as “cool.”