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  • As a kid I didn’t understand what the 555 timer chip on the Apple II disk controller was doing but I learned the hard way that when you misalign the pins on the drive connector cable and the 555 chip releases its blue smoke you can’t use the drive anymore :(
    by darrinm
  • When I was a camp counselor in my 20s I designed a one-octave "piano" out of one of these, a battery, paperclips for keys, and a shitload of resistors. We had the kids build them on proto board. They sounded harsh but you could play Mary Had a Little Lamb on them!
    by stackghost
  • The 555 timer is still the most popular chip that hobbyists add to their parts inventory (see rankings at https://partsbox.com/ecdb.html). I find this both interesting and curious — I'd say it has mostly nostalgic value at this point. Almost every practical problem today is better solved by something else. And yet it persists, I guess mostly because of beginner tutorials and first LED blinky circuits.

    One nice thing about the 555 is that at least it aged well and still is very usable in those beginner tutorials. Unlike for example the uA741 which no one should use.

    by jwr
  • You can learn about the origin of the 555 timer from its creator in his free book here: http://www.designinganalogchips.com/

    Fun fact: his original concept needed 9 pins and therefore was going be forced to have a 14 pin package. A late epiphany got it down to the 8 pin version we know today.

    by PhaseLockk
  • I still have the Forrest Mims III Radio Shack "555 Engineer's Mini-Notebook" somewhere in my basement. And rumor has it that Sammy Hagar can't drive 555 because his car just isn't fast enough!
    by SoleilAbsolu
  • Big Clive is currently livestreaming to celebrate the 555's birthday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzNjFJdaw_I
    by longwave
  • 5:55 video released on May 5th, as per description :)

    For something feeling like a fairly specific IC, I remember seeing many projects that use it throughout the years in wacky ways - and seeing it makes me happy to know that the sentiment for this little piece is shared.

    by 3form
  • A couple of years ago I used a 555 in an attempt to fix a problem I had with my Xiegu G90 ham radio. When sending CW (morse code), the radio would sometimes not see a "dit" (the short tone in morse code). I could reproduce it by tapping the paddle too quickly. My theory is that the G90 doesn't use interrupts to detect paddle presses, but rather polls those lines, and sometimes misses when a pulse happens completely in between polls. I made a little circuit using a 555, where the dit side triggers the 555 and closes the dit line just long enough to always be picked up by the G90, but short enough to never cause two dits (at least not at the speed I was going at). I didn't bother doing the same for the dah side, because apparently my index finger is slower than my thumb and the problem never came up there. It worked flawlessly, but only when not transmitting. As soon as RF got involved, it behaved weirdly. I tried adding ferrite beads, but it didn't solve it. In the end I never used it, and just learned to not slap the dits so fast, but it was a fun experience and see the 555 work.

    More details: https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/1eo9ki7/xiegy...

    by wkjagt

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