Giant 555 Timer
hackaday.com
hackaday.com
https://www.radioshack.com/products/getting-started-in-elect...
I’m surprised that RadioShack link still works, including the Add to Cart and Checkout buttons! Maybe the new owners are keeping the old e-commerce side alive?
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/search/radioshack/@42.3132621,-1...
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Tandy+Leather+Portland+-+2...
Wonder if they actually still have components or it's Yet Another Cellphone Store!
He was actually embarrassed at its crudeness, and would have done it very differently at the later date.
I guess there was an attempt at an updated version, but it didn't sell.
> The thing is that this is not a good design (the 555). I had a few years of experience, I’d say about five years, but I had no teacher, and I had to learn it by myself.
> You know it was really the beginning of design, so looking at it now, I would say “I wouldn’t do it like that again”. But nobody has actually changed it - it is still the same. They have shrunk it, they shrunk the dimensions. It was a 10 micrometer design, that was the standard size. You could make it in four (micrometers) now. This is more die per wafer, but nobody has changed the arrangement or the schematic.
> As a timer, you know, you trigger it and it runs for a certain time, it is very good. It has a temperature coefficient of like 23 parts per million. Over a large temperature range, that’s like .1 %. Its very stable. In free running mode, as an oscillator, its not so good, about 150 parts per million. And that you could improve down to about 10 ppm. So you could make an improved product. I’m amazed and stunned that in 30 years, somebody hasn’t looked at the schematic and said, “I can make this better”, so for the same area and same cost, and then they have a better product. Nobody has done that.
[1] http://www.semiconductormuseum.com/Transistors/LectureHall/C...
I enjoyed reading the interview. Besides this snippet, he talked about how modern design differs from back when he made the 555. It's always super impressive to me when someone keeps up with their craft through such huge technological changes.
http://www.designinganalogchips.com/_count/designinganalogch...
In one of the later chapters he introduces an updated NE555 design.
Like the 741 op amp its one of those inferior yet friendly teaching tools used heavily in academia.
>Eh can be done with a single 555 timer…
The difference is that the kit GP linked has surface-mount components, while the one you linked has through-hole components.
I built the through-hole version a few years ago, and it was great fun to try some classic 555 circuits.
If anyone is unsure of their soldering skills, the through-hole kit would likely be the easier one to start with.
Evil Mad Scientist makes some awesome stuff.
[1] Apparently it was a single electronics engineer, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Camenzind
My impression is that such prototypes were something given up quite reluctantly. It's the best way to verify your design works, after all. But eventually ICs developed enough. Either so tiny in process, that they behave electrically very different from circuits with macro components. Or simply so large in design, that it would cost more to build a discrete component prototype than just do a prototype mask run.
It’s a beautiful representation of a 555 timer in discrete component form - and functional too.
The 555 timer itself is a pretty simple IC since it’s just a few dozen transistors and resistors at its core.
https://twitter.com/njcw/status/1467522736000053256
Its the primary (20kV) for a tesla coil. The 555 toggles a power MOSFET which drives the primary of a car ignition coil making a nice crackly 20 kV spark.
The 555 was my first introduction to electronics. I still have the 555 book my dad gave me back in the 80s!
This probably says more about how bloaty modern software development is, than the capabilities of your hypothetical macro-M1. You wouldn't need a cluster. Just one should do. The entire traffic light system of San Francisco ran on a few PDP-8 controllers, once. About as fast as the macro M1 at 25 kHz. (Even at 25 kHz, with parallel execution, it'd still be completing hundreds of thousands of 64-bit-data instructions per second, running circles around something like the original IBM PC or even the early Macintosh.)
With hardware so cheap and software stacks so deep these days, we often grossly overestimate the number of cycles really necessary to complete a task.
he also made a working 1 bit processor the same way:
edited out my comment.