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

> 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.

Starting in electronics 47 years ago, digital electronics clicked for me in a way that analog didn’t. My early analog circuits often used digital components to create clear deterministic behavior. The 7400 was my do everything black box and the 555 was the timer of choice when it became available.

But I always dreamed of a digital future. When I was very young, microprocessors fascinated but intimidated me with their need for special support chips, and I would design 4 bit computers I couldn’t afford to build using 7400 logic and 4 bit SRAM.

For a while, I strayed from the path and learned to program on my C2-8P computer that my brother and I bought. By middle school, I was more or less distracted, and came back to technology later with the TS1000 and later the c64. Eventually, the AT2323 brought me back into electronics with MCUs, and I found it was the world I always fantasised about as a 7 year old kid designing 4 bit ALUs. I don’t know why I missed out on the early PIC days, but I think it was girls, cars, and LSD, mostly lol.

Anyway, since then, I’ll unashamedly put a 6 pin mcu in just to flash a light, but I’ll make it flash in a better way, so that it grabs your attention when it is starting or stopping flashing, for example. Or it will flash in a way that communicates just a little more about what it’s telling you. I find with MCUs your stuff can be just a little bit better in a thousand subtle ways, and despite 10000x the parts count, more reliable and resistant to environmental factors. With modern mixed-signal MCUs that can drive 60ma on a GPIO, most things can boil down to a single chip with a few external parts.

Then you get to stuff like the esp32 platform, where for $1 you get a single chip solution that puts my first 486 PC to shame playing DOOM, even while bit-banging the video output. There’s no point in using something less capable unless you are making more than a thousand units, in which case you can still end up with a $0.10 risc-V running a respectable 24 mhz at 32 bits, with more flash and ram than my old C2-8P.