555 Timer Circuits

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

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.

This absolutely matches my experience. I was very interested in electronics growing up in the 80s. I took everything apart (occasionally without breaking it), I had those spring terminal "200 in 1" kits, a crappy soldering iron, and tons of enthusiasm and energy to channel into it. But I very quickly hit a wall trying to understand analog circuits, and I gave up (and redirected my interest to computers).

Some of it could be the limited information I had access to, in a small town, pre-Internet. There was a lot of math, and this was when I was like 8-10 years old, so it was way over my head. But I tried several times over the following decades to get back into it, and I just couldn't find a way in that connected with me.

The point of all of this is that in 2012 I stumbled across an Arduino kit and everything changed. Now I could apply the digital logic and programming concepts I understood to make things that did stuff. I rediscovered my interest in electronics, and the part that's most relevant here is that because it was accessible and fun, it gave me an on ramp to start to explore the analog world a bit more. The concepts began to make sense and build on each other as I developed an intuition for how they worked, and now I feel reasonably comfortable with analog circuits.

So I don't see it so much as nobody is going to learn other things because they can just throw a MCU at it, I think it's a great way to get started and then go on to develop a more thorough understanding of electronics (if that's your thing).