555 Timer Circuits | slacker news

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

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

There is a reason I didn’t truly get into electronics as a kid. Only in adulthood with the introduction of the arduino (really esp8266) did any of that stuff click enough to get my interest.

All that analog stuff just got in the way from what I actually wanted to do. Build cool stuff. But back then there was way too much “complexity” between me and whatever cool thing I wanted to build and none of it was the good kind of complexity.

Starting out with modern MCU’s take all that away and let me build at the level of the project where what I do actually impacts things. If I had to worry about all that analog stuff, I never would have bother, just like as a kid I never bothered—I just did all my cool shit on the computer instead!