When
I first laid my hands on a 555 timer IC back in the early 1980s, it
was Nirvana. Having recently separated from the USAF, working as an
electronics technician at Westinghouse Electric, and working on my electrical
engineering degree in night school, I was eager to learn about and adopt
every bit of technology within reach. No opportunity was missed to integrate
the 555 into my designs for test fixtures and experimental circuits.
One such application was a custom timer that controlled a UV light source
for curing a particular adhesive we were using in a DoD classified project.
Those were exciting times.
Signetics(now
NXP) had introduced
its
NE555 in a decade earlier (1971) to
provide a simple, reliable means of generating a periodic squarewave
signal with an adjustable duty cycle. Astable, retriggerable monostable,
and bistable multivibrator configurations were accommodated. The 555
faithful still design them into products, but for the most part other
resources have replaced it. For those who still salivate at the mere
sight of those three fives strung together, a company named Evil Mad
Scientist Laboratories has, with the assistance of Eric Schlaepfer (tubetime.us),
created the
Three Fives Kit: A 555 Timer, which is a macro size
(3-1/8" x 5-1/4") 555 timer kit for you
to build out of discrete parts. It even has a supersize DIP pins - four
on each side.
Depending on which company's schematic you find,
there can be between 24 and 26 transistors in the circuit, with a sprinkling
of biasing resistors. This one uses 24 transistors and 15 resistors.
According to EMSL the model can be patched into circuits in place of
the original 555 timer and it will work in an equivalent manner. The
Three Fives Kit would definitely make a great conversation piece,
and it might also be useful during an interview to probe a candidate's
basic knowledge of transistor circuits. $35 (+ as little as $3.22 shipping)
seem like a reasonable price for such a piece of nostalgia.
LM555 Timer Schematic (TI)
LM555 Block Diagram
Here is an hour-long video where Dave Jones
(not
Davy Jones of the
Monkees, but British
nonetheless) of the
EEV Blog website takes you through the entire assembly process.
You can skip past a lot of the soldering if you are not the type to
watch grass grow or paint dry.
RF Cafe began life in 1996 as "RF Tools" in an AOL screen name web space totaling
2 MB. Its primary purpose was to provide me with ready access to commonly needed
formulas and reference material while performing my work as an RF system and circuit
design engineer. The World Wide Web (Internet) was largely an unknown entity at
the time and bandwidth was a scarce commodity. Dial-up modems blazed along at 14.4 kbps
while tying up your telephone line, and a lady's voice announced "You've Got Mail"
when a new message arrived...
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