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The 555 and How It Got That Way

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Re: The 555 and How It Got That Way

#31

Post by exoesquitur »

The 555 was great.

These days I usually just drop in a 6 pin microcontroller though. Less external parts, cheaper, less environmental instability, much more operational flexibility, and often I can have it perform several circuit functions. If I go to 8 pins, woah, look out!

I do so much digitally now that I've "forgotten" 75 percent of my analog stuff... Once in a while I come upon a cool analog trick though. Sad part is, that usually the "super simple, bulletproof" analog solution with just 5 parts usually ends up being more expensive in qc, bom, and board space that throwing a million transistors at it.

It's a strange world we live in.

Re: The 555 and How It Got That Way

#32

Post by amelius »

exoesquitur wrote: post #31

The 555 was great. These days I usually just drop in a 6 pin microcontroller though. Less external parts, cheaper, less environmental instability, much more operational flexibility, and often I can have it perform several circuit functions. If I go to 8 pins, woah, look out! I do so much digitally now that I've "forgotten" 75 percent of my analog stuff... Once in a while I come upon a cool analog trick though. Sad pa…

The 555 is already overkill if you want a simple oscillator with fixed parameters. You can build one with two transistors.

Re: The 555 and How It Got That Way

#33

Post by Yetanfou »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #18

How did people 'reserve' a chip name back then? It's pretty cool to get 555, but what if some other designer wanted to call their chip 555 too?

As far as I know they just used whatever number they wanted, leading to confusing situations where one producers ' 4736 (made up, no idea if this one exists) would be a totally different thing from another's 4736. You'd keep them apart by the manufacturer code, i.e. FOO4736 = 'double-width gizmotron' while BAR4736='confufabulator (4ch)'. I used to leaf through catalogues looking for 'interesting' circuits and came across quite a number of such confusingly-named parts.

Re: The 555 and How It Got That Way

#36

Post by howard941 »

int0x80 wrote: post #26
baybal2 wrote: post #24

Hard to admit: people like Bob Pease and Hans Camenzind would not find any much employment in today's industry even if they were back in their prime. Work culture in America has changed since sixties.

why is that?

Along with what baybal2 says today they'd have to fit in to a corporate environment that rewards credentials over demonstrated skills, gladhanding and backslapping over geeking, financial engineering over the creation of tangible things.

Re: The 555 and How It Got That Way

#38

Post by rjbez17 »

baybal2 wrote: post #27
int0x80 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why is that?

A paradigm shift. How it was: "make the chip, sell it later." How it is now: "sell the chip first, find out how to make it later if you did." Companies now trust marketing/sales boys to know the market better than the very people who made that industry. In sixties, a CEO comes to an engineer and asks what will be the "next bug thing" in one year term. Today, a CEO comes to an engineer and tells him what will be the "…

Well you also have to remember that companies came and went faster than startups did. And consolidation happened quite quickly as well. Engineers made cool things but only a handful of the companies found a hit, and rarely did the same company consistently find the best. What ended up happening is the bigger companies just started buying the small company that had the hit that year. The old model was no more sustainable than the current model.

Re: The 555 and How It Got That Way

#39

Post by lisper »

amelius wrote: post #32
exoesquitur wrote: post #31

The 555 was great. These days I usually just drop in a 6 pin microcontroller though. Less external parts, cheaper, less environmental instability, much more operational flexibility, and often I can have it perform several circuit functions. If I go to 8 pins, woah, look out! I do so much digitally now that I've "forgotten" 75 percent of my analog stuff... Once in a while I come upon a cool analog trick though. Sad pa…

The 555 is already overkill if you want a simple oscillator with fixed parameters. You can build one with two transistors.

Transistors are essentially free nowadays. Packaging and assembly are the cost drivers.

Re: The 555 and How It Got That Way

#40

Post by mikepurvis »

exoesquitur wrote: post #31

The 555 was great. These days I usually just drop in a 6 pin microcontroller though. Less external parts, cheaper, less environmental instability, much more operational flexibility, and often I can have it perform several circuit functions. If I go to 8 pins, woah, look out! I do so much digitally now that I've "forgotten" 75 percent of my analog stuff... Once in a while I come upon a cool analog trick though. Sad pa…

Is this for a production device or like a hobby type thing? Reason I ask is that I'm often resistant to adding auxiliary microcontrollers to things just due to the extra hassle of maintaining, building, and distributing the firmware for them. Like, even if it's a device with JTAG, that's still a program-once-in-the-factory affair, unless you go the trouble of also setting up an SPI bootloader or something on it.

I guess the counter argument is that a 555 circuit can't be reprogrammed either, but it also doesn't have to be programmed even the first time.

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