Comment by rzzzwilson
Comment by rzzzwilson a day ago
As an electronics experimenter I would have to say the REAL eternal chip is the 555 introduced in 1972. It's become a bit of a meme: You could have used a 555 for that!
Comment by rzzzwilson a day ago
As an electronics experimenter I would have to say the REAL eternal chip is the 555 introduced in 1972. It's become a bit of a meme: You could have used a 555 for that!
MCUs are just too cheap not to use them these days.
They were always more flexible, are usually more accurate, and are often easier to engineer. With the price point now being roughly the same, it makes zero business sense to go for a 555.
"You could've used a 555" is becoming the new "you could've used a punch card"/"you could've used a vacuum tube": true, but would that make it better?
You can even make a rug out of it. https://www.righto.com/2025/09/marilou-schultz-navajo-555-we...
76477. I still have one on a board around here somewhere.
I'm thinking of these ICs: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskElectronics/comments/a8af60/can_...
One of the more famous toys using it (in blob form) is the Executor/Echo Keyller keychain: https://youtu.be/20W6AJuMjEk
Related video: stop using the LM741 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e67WiJ6IPlQ
It's become a bit of a meme: You could have used a 555 for that!
Unfortunately, those days seem to be gone. Now any time I see someone point out "you could just use a 555 for that", people are replying "I just threw an PIC/AVR/STM32/RPi in there instead...software is so much better than having to do math to calculate those R and C values".