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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: 0.827s | source
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II2II ◴[19 Oct 24 23:03 UTC] No.41891469[source]▶
Plenty of people are commenting on how modern microcontrollers are better than the 555. I agree, with a caveat: the 555 is a great learning tool. It is complex enough to be interesting, yet simple enough to be well understood. It is easy to clip an oscilloscope to it's pins to have a visual representation of how its inputs affects its outputs. It is a stepping stone that helps people learn how to build more complex circuits. Much as some software developers have to understand assembly language to build the most fundamental bits of software (e.g. compilers), some people have need to understand electronics to build the most fundamental bits of hardware.
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1. 6SixTy ◴[20 Oct 24 18:37 UTC] No.41897499[source]▶
Only problem is that an oscilloscope isn't accessible to beginners. It's a specialist piece of equipment that takes time to learn how to use, and are furiously expensive at best for someone who doesn't know they might like electronics to buy. That's fundamentally why people are lauding the benefits of microcontrollers, figuring out what's wrong with one doesn't require an O-scope.
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2. nuancebydefault ◴[20 Oct 24 21:35 UTC] No.41898668[source]▶
Indeed. An intuitive, easy to use oscilloscope needs at least to be digital and hence expensive. An alternative is using an electronics workbench simulator, but then again you might as well go fully digital.

When circuits become larger than trivial, the analog way is noise and temperature sensitive, you will spend a lot of time on tweaking those aspects by themselves.

3. II2II ◴[20 Oct 24 21:35 UTC] No.41898670[source]▶
That really depends upon the context. Many learn electronics in a classroom environment. Even for those who learn electronics independently, it has been possible to get new oscilloscopes that work at audio frequencies for well under $100 for many years. It looks like scopes that operate upto 20 MHz have been available for under $100 for a couple of years. They aren't great, but they are still powerful tools for learning.

And while scopes do take time to learn, learning about scopes themselves will convey a lot of fundamental information about electronics. I also wouldn't underestimate the difficulty in learning how to use microcontrollers. While using something like Arduino (boards, shields, development tools, and libraries) may be straight forward, the learning curve rises steeply as soon as you try to do anything truly independently. More steeply, I would suggest, than learning how to use an osilloscope. Besides, most of those development boards cost a lot more than a bare chip.