In some respects, it's a testament to how much the world of electronics has changed over the past ~25 years. It used to be that 555 was this Swiss-army-knife IC that you had to learn about. Multiple people published entire books about it!
Today, it's essentially obsolete. You're quite unlikely to find it in any competently-done commercial designs. Every analog trick you can do with it can be done more cheaply, more reliably, with better power efficiency, and with fewer external components using a modern MCU.
It's not that analog is dead, but it's solving different problems now. Including how to keep ultra-high-speed digital signals usable within the footprint of a PCB - which wasn't that much of a consideration in the golden days of the 555.
Yep, came to this realization awhile ago, about the superiority of digital in many cases, when I had an amplifier project with a dizzying number of requirements and a very large dynamic range and (log) linearity needed. Ended up using a few ranges of ADC’s, doing the required mathematical transform on a MCU, then outputting the required voltage with a DAC. The previous gen was some fairly complex circuit designed by a smart analog guy and still wasn’t nearly as performant
"You're quite unlikely to find it in any competently-done commercial designs."
You'll find them in tons of commercial designs - your modern headlights (which I manufacture) and off-road lights use them in droves. Short-timed lighting like automatic UVC sterilization lighting and such also still relies heavily upon a 555 timer just to act as the on/off switch for the power driver pushing the LEDs.
Now I’m curious: what is the role of the 555 timer in a headlight?
I have a bit of a pet peeve about car lights (usually exterior lights that aren’t the headlights) that are visibly pulsed. They can be distracting. I think they should all be designed to operate either at silly frequencies that are genuinely undetectable by human eyes (30kHz?) or to genuinely operate at DC.
I'd guess that a 555 is also tougher than a microcontroller. I'm putting together an HV supply and thought about using a microcontroller but opted for a 555-based oscillator. Either one won't survive HV but I think the 555 will handle stray charges better.
There's still plenty of analog control out there, it's just all hidden away as parts can integrate the sensor, controller and actuator, all in one magic IC. And it can definitely be lower power and cheaper, in volume. The main weakness is the NRE is higher than the typical MCU project so it's not really seen in low volume or hobby level stuff.
Even in jellybean analog, almost everything you can do with a 555 timer you can do with a quad comparator. And more. Over a bigger voltage range, too. It’s usually a design smell to see a 555 used for anything in a professional design, even from before the tiny mcu era.
Its kind of interesting: the 555 is such _horrible_ timer. It can't do a 50% duty cycle without extra BOM parts, even more parts to make a real PWM out of it, and it has terrible temperature and voltage stability. But somehow it persists.
“Hi, Jeff H., I have almost never used a 555. Maybe never? I use op-amps, LM324's, LM311's, LF356's. I use 74HC04's and 74C14's but not 555's. I've used ECL fast logic, and discrete transistors. But the 555 just does not do anything precise, or even semi-precise, that I need done. So that's one thing I can "share" - my favorite circuit to use a 555, is: a blank piece of paper. Never touch the things. Go ahead and print that. / rap”
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.
> Pre-Arduino, learning electronics wasn't more profound. It was just less accessible.
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).
> 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.
I agree with both you and the GP. Arduinos tend to make goofing around with electronics more accessible to more people. At the same time a lot of projects could be built very simply with just a couple timer chips. It's unfortunate people reach for a relatively complex solution (Arduino etc) to what's ultimately a simple problem. They would benefit a great deal from just knowing a blinking light can be made very simply with a simple circuit.
You raise an interesting issue to which I offer just ONE counterpoint. That is, a 555 circuit often requires external circuits that involve useful theory beyond basic circuits.
I’m thinking RC timing and voltage dividers. These have practical application. Would it ever get used elsewhere? That is where my thinking merges to yours.
Forty years from when I started that journey, not sure it can’t be learned from a wiki.
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.
I grew up with Arduinos, never used 555 because it draws too much current for what it is doing. I get how it once was a popular thing, but if I need a simple delay circuit or simple logic that needs to e precise I do it discretev if ir needs to be more complex there is any number of MCUs.
I was 100% self thought and teach electronics in art university now. And I have to say I can't really confirm your suspicions about "the kids", sure many stay at the module level (totally okay, they study arts not electronics), but many don't. I had a student who over the course of 2 years built a brain wave reading circuit with a specialized instrumentation amplifier IC, to filter out grid EMF she built an opamp based notch filter and that woman had nearly no help from me and no prior education in the field. That analog stuff isn't going away anytime soon.
It is a bit unfair though as one is comparing new MCU to ancient parts. For example the TLV9301 is a updated version on the 741 and is superior in basically every possible spec, but people still use the 741 out of habit. And if you need a lower power discrete timer, the 555 is not the best way to do it in 2024. There are a huge number of options.
For art projects I totally get using a MCU. You're probably only making one and the product is the art. The engineering just gets in the way so minimizing man hours, which includes the time to learn to do the thing, is critical. It will be tough to beat a MCU on that metric.
The problem with starting with a 555 timer is that the things you can make with a 555 timer aren’t impressive to kids anymore. Oh, you made a sound that gets higher pitched when there’s more light on it? I thought that shit was amazing when I was 8. But my son wouldn’t look twice at that. So we started with Arduino so that the first thing he created was something he saw as “cool.”
I wonder if that will come around though, where it's cool because it seems so simple or 'real' compared to black box software or AI walking talking robot or wherever we are.
I grew up interested in stuff like that, taking walkie-talkies apart and building electromagnets with nails etc. - despite the availability of the world wide web & DAB radio.
I disagree. I as an adult with zero prior experience with electronics have recently completed the book "Make: Electronics", which contains such experiments, and I got a sense of amazement very much resembling one that a(n) (intellectually curious) child would have. A 555, a couple of trimpots and a speaker can be loads of fun!
> 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.
> It’s a shame that Arduino has effectively truncated kids learning with a full MCU as the “building block” of their learning
There is a reason I didn’t truly get into electronics as a kid. Only in adulthood with the introduction of the arduino (really esp8266) did any of that stuff click enough to get my interest.
All that analog stuff just got in the way from what I actually wanted to do. Build cool stuff. But back then there was way too much “complexity” between me and whatever cool thing I wanted to build and none of it was the good kind of complexity.
Starting out with modern MCU’s take all that away and let me build at the level of the project where what I do actually impacts things. If I had to worry about all that analog stuff, I never would have bother, just like as a kid I never bothered—I just did all my cool shit on the computer instead!
This tension between two paths, the microcontroller path vs the analog path, there is a bit of an analog to this in the game Factorio. You can use combinators to build sophisticated circuits (the microcontroller path), but there's also a lot you can do with just a few red wires (the analog path).
I’m in a 3 year mechatronics program, and we covered 555, LM741, and similar ICs in our 2nd semester PLC/digital/electronics class. No microcontrollers until year 2. I don’t feel I conceptualized it very well, but it gave me a good whetted appetite to dive further.
Why Arduinos in particular? We're in an era where you can choose any MCU (ARM, Espressif, RiscV e tc), pick a language you like within limits (C, C++, Rust, Python (sort of)), and make it happen. Open KiCad, design a PCB, and have it arrive from Shenzhen in 10 days. Or, order a dev board, and attach additional circuits to it. (STM32 Discovery, nordic dev kit, one of the cheap Chinese ones "pill" etc.) Design whatever circuits you want. Use passives, or string together ICs.
555 is obsolete tech. I see this as equivalent to suggesting someone buy an Apple II instead of a modern PC.
This is a good question. I think that "Arduino" means a couple of different things, and it's sometimes hard to guess what someone means from context.
There's "Arduino" the old 16-bit MCU board, and there's "Arduino" the development platform supporting a huge ecosystem of MCUs, libraries, and accessories.
For instance, I use the Arduino IDE, but with a variety of dev boards to suit my needs. For my work, I don't need to cost-engineer anything, so I'm satisfied with pre-made modules that I plug into my own application boards.
A lot of engineers dismissed Arduino long ago, and are utterly unaware that the broader ecosystem even exists.
I don't object to a beginner choosing the original Arduino board, for which there's huge amounts of tutorials and documentation. And then, maybe graduating to a more performant board if they take an interest in more advanced or specialized projects.
I always use the term “arduino” when I describe any of the MCU “space” to somebody not in the field. Odds are much better that a person heard of “those arduino thinks you can use to program your lights” than “esp32s3” even though the s3 is my goto microcontroller.
The second the conversation steers towards actual product selection… that is the time to introduce the MCU space and steer them to the right fit. You do always have to remember that most of those arduino MCU’s have a 5 volt logic level that is more compatible with “LEGO part style electronics” than things like the ESP chips.
Plenty of people are commenting on how modern microcontrollers are better than the 555. I agree, with a caveat: the 555 is a great learning tool. It is complex enough to be interesting, yet simple enough to be well understood. It is easy to clip an oscilloscope to it's pins to have a visual representation of how its inputs affects its outputs. It is a stepping stone that helps people learn how to build more complex circuits. Much as some software developers have to understand assembly language to build the most fundamental bits of software (e.g. compilers), some people have need to understand electronics to build the most fundamental bits of hardware.
I always found DACs/IO to be the limiting thing with microcontrollers. That and latency in general. When you were doing analog stuff with op-amps, yeah, you were setting yourself up for other problems like thermal drift, but there was never any worry that you were going to run out of capacity like you would switching tasks on a microcontroller, and latency was negligible. Plus there weren't many wires and you could see it on a scope. It was all satisfyingly immediate. I wonder what kind of cheap and ubiquitous DSPs(?) people use for that kind of niche nowadays, to do it digitally(?). Do they string DACs together on a bus somehow? How do you get, say, signals flowing around at a couple hundred kHz sample rates, with nice dataflow parallelism -- and then get those signals out to actuators, without much latency -- in that world? Like, what would you use to mix a bunch of audio and run some IIR filters with 20ns latency? Or control, say, four motors with, I dunno, 1 kHz bandwidth? I get this feeling that DACs remain a bottleneck and you're rapidly looking at expensive stuff to do that with a microcontroller, but maybe I'm wrong; I don't do this stuff.
As an FPGA developer: much agreed. We know exactly what's happening every clock cycle (or at least can), and often are able to have extremely deterministic computation. You can do this on micros, but anything with good performance will have some caching, maybe context switching, etc. The polarfire SoC marketing has a graph showing either determinism or performance (I can dig it up if interested). In FPGA land, we define the pipelining such that we get both. I usually go out to an RFIC then stop caring, but you can calculate the latencies the as well.
Only problem is that an oscilloscope isn't accessible to beginners. It's a specialist piece of equipment that takes time to learn how to use, and are furiously expensive at best for someone who doesn't know they might like electronics to buy. That's fundamentally why people are lauding the benefits of microcontrollers, figuring out what's wrong with one doesn't require an O-scope.
That really depends upon the context. Many learn electronics in a classroom environment. Even for those who learn electronics independently, it has been possible to get new oscilloscopes that work at audio frequencies for well under $100 for many years. It looks like scopes that operate upto 20 MHz have been available for under $100 for a couple of years. They aren't great, but they are still powerful tools for learning.
And while scopes do take time to learn, learning about scopes themselves will convey a lot of fundamental information about electronics. I also wouldn't underestimate the difficulty in learning how to use microcontrollers. While using something like Arduino (boards, shields, development tools, and libraries) may be straight forward, the learning curve rises steeply as soon as you try to do anything truly independently. More steeply, I would suggest, than learning how to use an osilloscope. Besides, most of those development boards cost a lot more than a bare chip.
Indeed. An intuitive, easy to use oscilloscope needs at least to be digital and hence expensive. An alternative is using an electronics workbench simulator, but then again you might as well go fully digital.
When circuits become larger than trivial, the analog way is noise and temperature sensitive, you will spend a lot of time on tweaking those aspects by themselves.
Here's my tip for the 555 timer: Learn what's inside it! As you can see on the "Inside the 555" page, there are fewer than 10 functional components inside and three of them are resistors.
For some reason I always struggled to remember the different operating mode configurations, what they are called, and how to set them up. But one day I was trying to build a specific thing and decided to sit down and actually understand the 555. To my surprise, it's really simple in operation and requires relatively little electronics theory to understand and derive the different configurations yourself. Once I did that, I haven't forgotten it and I can come up with more creative uses for the 555.
The Evil Mad Scientist kits are a great way to learn what's inside it. They are faithful replicas of the internal 555 circuitry, built with discrete transistors and resistors.
You mentioned only ten functional components inside it, but if you look at individual transistors and resistors, there are quite a few more.
'10' would be counting the comparator and 2 op-amps as 3 components, the replicas you're pointing at break those out to discretes too, because once you've started down that road, why wouldn't you?
Apropos. I made TV-surveillance unit when 555 was almost brand new. Maybe 1977. The start of a picture was long negative pulse, easy to recognize with 555, which triggered second 555, which triggered third 555 in unison with the horizontal scan pulse. Thus you had fairly accurate point selected in the screen, showing a dot, while camera info was sampled and compared to a preset value. Thus the watchmen could use few knobs and select a point in the screen, which would raise an alarm when illumination changed. Because it was so cheap, you could select multiple triggering points. No fancy microprocessors this time, which were too slow anyways.
He’s working on a new book that attempts to disprove evolution or at least show cases to the contrary, advocating for a grand design as a primary mechanism instead. Curious to read it, I’m hopeful he will release it.
My biggest critiques are that it consistently fails its predictions. You’d see an endless stream of intermediate forms going in so many directions. Instead, we saw few if any, nature organized more hierarchically, and organisms just appear out of thin air after extinctions (eg Cambrian Explosion). Instead of falsification, scientists keep making excuses for it like it is a religion that can’t be wrong.
I’ll add that humans have observed creatures, in their areas and in captivity, for a long time. We haven’t seen the chickens start giving birth to different animals. I’m grateful the fire ants and poisonous spiders we’re dodging haven’t turned into something more effective. Dumb evolution would have a crazy number of adaptation streams happening, many attempts per species, to create all the life we see. Instead, we see exactly zero movement from one kind of animal to another with changes only happening within kinds.
Whereas, studies of creation itself have proven the opposite. Everything from our non-life experiments to evolutionary algorithms show a creator who fine tunes is necessary. The universe itself has many constants that never change, they work together in precise ways, all has perfect reliability, and life on Earth depends on most of them. Complexity of most of biology is such that we’re incapable of manufacturing it. (See a lung vs a respirator.) It only gets more and more impossible over time the more we learned.
On time scales (X is millions of years old), they seem to assume the Earth didn’t change much at all over a long period of time. A specific thing changes at rate X. They’ll roll the clock back that much until they hit a point in their theory. Both human literature (esp Genesis) and the fossil record show catastrophes with huge effects on the Earth. It probably went through many changes. So, all time estimates that make that assumption are faith-based, likely-incorrect beliefs no matter how many textbooks they end up in. There is a minority studying Catastrophism or something like that to understand their effect.
Finally, godless science that broke from Christian scientists, like Newton and Pascal, all backed David Hume saying only material, observable things exist. Nothing else is ever allowed in scientific theory. A faith-based, unproven belief. While still making godless and materialism axiomatic, the same scientists tell us of a world outside our universe, exceeding the laws of physics, and maybe even having effects on observed phenomenon. Instead of things with evidence (eg Bible), they’ve shifted to purely-imaginary constructs outside the universe to support their claims which themselves contradict the Hume foundation they demand of us. They do it while denying the logical implications of the complexity and fine-tuning we’ve observed.
Those are some examples of counters to mainstream creation, like evolution and long timescales, being a pile of faith-based dogma that continues to fail in scientific experiments, historical writings, complexity theory, and global observations by laypeople. Outside of minor adaptation, evolution theory is provably false which leaves God as the primary hypothesis. From there, we consider whichever God claim has the most evidence and impact. That’s Jesus Christ. :)
Built many a 555 timer circuit back in the day! But in modern times, I can get an ATMega328p already attached to a PC board for $2.50 and load code on it to do whatever I want, including blink a red LED.
Not only are cheap microcontrollers often an easier choice for things the NE555 might be used for, they often draw far less power as well. I personally prefer to use an even smaller and cheaper micro like the ATTiny13A. It's also worth noting that your traditional 555 timers don't like to run below 5V, for that you'll need something like an LMC555. If you're building up a parts inventory, it often makes sense to have a bunch of very cheap micros rather than special purpose parts.
Can you actually get a genuine Atmel for that price? Bottom-rung Chinese Arduino clones sure, but you better order 10 of them because they will randomly stop working as you're tinkering with your circuit.
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Today, it's essentially obsolete. You're quite unlikely to find it in any competently-done commercial designs. Every analog trick you can do with it can be done more cheaply, more reliably, with better power efficiency, and with fewer external components using a modern MCU.
It's not that analog is dead, but it's solving different problems now. Including how to keep ultra-high-speed digital signals usable within the footprint of a PCB - which wasn't that much of a consideration in the golden days of the 555.
You'll find them in tons of commercial designs - your modern headlights (which I manufacture) and off-road lights use them in droves. Short-timed lighting like automatic UVC sterilization lighting and such also still relies heavily upon a 555 timer just to act as the on/off switch for the power driver pushing the LEDs.
I have a bit of a pet peeve about car lights (usually exterior lights that aren’t the headlights) that are visibly pulsed. They can be distracting. I think they should all be designed to operate either at silly frequencies that are genuinely undetectable by human eyes (30kHz?) or to genuinely operate at DC.
But even there, it's high Iq limits its applicability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang–bang_control
There's still plenty of analog control out there, it's just all hidden away as parts can integrate the sensor, controller and actuator, all in one magic IC. And it can definitely be lower power and cheaper, in volume. The main weakness is the NRE is higher than the typical MCU project so it's not really seen in low volume or hobby level stuff.
It makes a nifty missing pulse detector, though.
“Hi, Jeff H., I have almost never used a 555. Maybe never? I use op-amps, LM324's, LM311's, LF356's. I use 74HC04's and 74C14's but not 555's. I've used ECL fast logic, and discrete transistors. But the 555 just does not do anything precise, or even semi-precise, that I need done. So that's one thing I can "share" - my favorite circuit to use a 555, is: a blank piece of paper. Never touch the things. Go ahead and print that. / rap”
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).
I agree with both you and the GP. Arduinos tend to make goofing around with electronics more accessible to more people. At the same time a lot of projects could be built very simply with just a couple timer chips. It's unfortunate people reach for a relatively complex solution (Arduino etc) to what's ultimately a simple problem. They would benefit a great deal from just knowing a blinking light can be made very simply with a simple circuit.
I’m thinking RC timing and voltage dividers. These have practical application. Would it ever get used elsewhere? That is where my thinking merges to yours.
Forty years from when I started that journey, not sure it can’t be learned from a wiki.
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.
I was 100% self thought and teach electronics in art university now. And I have to say I can't really confirm your suspicions about "the kids", sure many stay at the module level (totally okay, they study arts not electronics), but many don't. I had a student who over the course of 2 years built a brain wave reading circuit with a specialized instrumentation amplifier IC, to filter out grid EMF she built an opamp based notch filter and that woman had nearly no help from me and no prior education in the field. That analog stuff isn't going away anytime soon.
For art projects I totally get using a MCU. You're probably only making one and the product is the art. The engineering just gets in the way so minimizing man hours, which includes the time to learn to do the thing, is critical. It will be tough to beat a MCU on that metric.
I grew up interested in stuff like that, taking walkie-talkies apart and building electromagnets with nails etc. - despite the availability of the world wide web & DAB radio.
[1] https://www.555-timer-circuits.com/stun-gun.html
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.
There is a reason I didn’t truly get into electronics as a kid. Only in adulthood with the introduction of the arduino (really esp8266) did any of that stuff click enough to get my interest.
All that analog stuff just got in the way from what I actually wanted to do. Build cool stuff. But back then there was way too much “complexity” between me and whatever cool thing I wanted to build and none of it was the good kind of complexity.
Starting out with modern MCU’s take all that away and let me build at the level of the project where what I do actually impacts things. If I had to worry about all that analog stuff, I never would have bother, just like as a kid I never bothered—I just did all my cool shit on the computer instead!
555 is obsolete tech. I see this as equivalent to suggesting someone buy an Apple II instead of a modern PC.
This is a good question. I think that "Arduino" means a couple of different things, and it's sometimes hard to guess what someone means from context.
There's "Arduino" the old 16-bit MCU board, and there's "Arduino" the development platform supporting a huge ecosystem of MCUs, libraries, and accessories.
For instance, I use the Arduino IDE, but with a variety of dev boards to suit my needs. For my work, I don't need to cost-engineer anything, so I'm satisfied with pre-made modules that I plug into my own application boards.
A lot of engineers dismissed Arduino long ago, and are utterly unaware that the broader ecosystem even exists.
I don't object to a beginner choosing the original Arduino board, for which there's huge amounts of tutorials and documentation. And then, maybe graduating to a more performant board if they take an interest in more advanced or specialized projects.
The second the conversation steers towards actual product selection… that is the time to introduce the MCU space and steer them to the right fit. You do always have to remember that most of those arduino MCU’s have a 5 volt logic level that is more compatible with “LEGO part style electronics” than things like the ESP chips.
And while scopes do take time to learn, learning about scopes themselves will convey a lot of fundamental information about electronics. I also wouldn't underestimate the difficulty in learning how to use microcontrollers. While using something like Arduino (boards, shields, development tools, and libraries) may be straight forward, the learning curve rises steeply as soon as you try to do anything truly independently. More steeply, I would suggest, than learning how to use an osilloscope. Besides, most of those development boards cost a lot more than a bare chip.
When circuits become larger than trivial, the analog way is noise and temperature sensitive, you will spend a lot of time on tweaking those aspects by themselves.
For some reason I always struggled to remember the different operating mode configurations, what they are called, and how to set them up. But one day I was trying to build a specific thing and decided to sit down and actually understand the 555. To my surprise, it's really simple in operation and requires relatively little electronics theory to understand and derive the different configurations yourself. Once I did that, I haven't forgotten it and I can come up with more creative uses for the 555.
You mentioned only ten functional components inside it, but if you look at individual transistors and resistors, there are quite a few more.
Here is the through-hole component version:
https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/652
And a surface mount device version:
https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/922
I built the through-hole version, and it worked the first time I wired up a circuit around it.
Highly recommended!
You could make it so you could control it with a light pen. It would integrate over a window of a single scan line?
A slightly more complex device could retrigger and sum into a bucket brigade and integrate over a region.
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/?int...
https://answersingenesis.org/theory-of-evolution/12-the-basi...
My biggest critiques are that it consistently fails its predictions. You’d see an endless stream of intermediate forms going in so many directions. Instead, we saw few if any, nature organized more hierarchically, and organisms just appear out of thin air after extinctions (eg Cambrian Explosion). Instead of falsification, scientists keep making excuses for it like it is a religion that can’t be wrong.
I’ll add that humans have observed creatures, in their areas and in captivity, for a long time. We haven’t seen the chickens start giving birth to different animals. I’m grateful the fire ants and poisonous spiders we’re dodging haven’t turned into something more effective. Dumb evolution would have a crazy number of adaptation streams happening, many attempts per species, to create all the life we see. Instead, we see exactly zero movement from one kind of animal to another with changes only happening within kinds.
Whereas, studies of creation itself have proven the opposite. Everything from our non-life experiments to evolutionary algorithms show a creator who fine tunes is necessary. The universe itself has many constants that never change, they work together in precise ways, all has perfect reliability, and life on Earth depends on most of them. Complexity of most of biology is such that we’re incapable of manufacturing it. (See a lung vs a respirator.) It only gets more and more impossible over time the more we learned.
On time scales (X is millions of years old), they seem to assume the Earth didn’t change much at all over a long period of time. A specific thing changes at rate X. They’ll roll the clock back that much until they hit a point in their theory. Both human literature (esp Genesis) and the fossil record show catastrophes with huge effects on the Earth. It probably went through many changes. So, all time estimates that make that assumption are faith-based, likely-incorrect beliefs no matter how many textbooks they end up in. There is a minority studying Catastrophism or something like that to understand their effect.
Finally, godless science that broke from Christian scientists, like Newton and Pascal, all backed David Hume saying only material, observable things exist. Nothing else is ever allowed in scientific theory. A faith-based, unproven belief. While still making godless and materialism axiomatic, the same scientists tell us of a world outside our universe, exceeding the laws of physics, and maybe even having effects on observed phenomenon. Instead of things with evidence (eg Bible), they’ve shifted to purely-imaginary constructs outside the universe to support their claims which themselves contradict the Hume foundation they demand of us. They do it while denying the logical implications of the complexity and fine-tuning we’ve observed.
Those are some examples of counters to mainstream creation, like evolution and long timescales, being a pile of faith-based dogma that continues to fail in scientific experiments, historical writings, complexity theory, and global observations by laypeople. Outside of minor adaptation, evolution theory is provably false which leaves God as the primary hypothesis. From there, we consider whichever God claim has the most evidence and impact. That’s Jesus Christ. :)
Microcontrollers obviously have more than 1 bit of memory + 2x analog comparators + one 33% / 66% voltage divider (which is all a 555 timer truly is).
What is surprising however is how flexible 1 bit of memory + 2x analog comparators + one 33% / 66% voltage divider
Indeed, a small $0.23 mcu may have its own internal RC oscillator, or even a MEMS based resonator on a PLL. =3