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

> Often a BJT or power fet is all they need (say for a basic relay trigger).

Perhaps you mean BJT+resistor+diode+relay or FET+diode+relay is all they need?

The value in the module is that it includes the necessary components required so that the circuit doesn't break. And such breaking is highly destructive to the learning process. You need to get kids excited about what they might be able to do on a larger scale, before you can trick them into studying the lower level details and diligence required to make it happen.

My own childhood explorations in electronics were stunted due to not understanding that BJTs were current devices, and what all those resistors were for. I'd try to modify a circuit, destroy a transistor, and then no amount of playing around would get things working again. Especially on those toy kits where every component was broken out into spring terminals - I basically learned that the transistor section was verboten unless I was building something exactly from the manual. Sometimes I ponder how much earlier I would have understood electronics in an alternative timeline that emphasized 2N7000's instead of 2N3904's.