View soure for "doin' it all with 555s" [hw gem] from 2025-04-01 in analog, humor.
For April First, a guide to replace everything with 555 ICs.
Doin’ It With A 555: One Chip to Rule Them All
The venerable 555 IC (Swift.Hg, Wikimedia Commons)
Humans and other foreign species, welcome to the most groundbreaking revelation in recent electronics history. For decades, engineers and hobbyists alike have believed, unquestioning, in the supremacy of microcontrollers, op-amps, transistors, and all those other fancy components – only for me to tell you they can be replaced with 555 timer ICs. Every single one.
Today, on this most auspicious and interesting of April 1sts since the summer of 1971 – April 1st, 2025 – I present to you the definitive guide to replacing all components with a 555 timer. Prepare to be amazed, baffled, and (my hope is) not horrified by the sheer brilliance of this approach.
To begin, I’d like to remind you that for decades you have been played for absolute fools by the utterly deranged into putting your hard-earned aʀʒɑ̃ into purchasing ‘microcontrollers’, which are, under the metaphorical hood and inside the literal uncapped silicon die, a fancy collection of the soft switches you may know as transistors.
What you must first do is realize on looking into yourself (and a 555’s internal diagram) that the 555 timer is already a transistor, with two transistors being a part of its internal circuit. TWO!
In its simplest form, the 555 operates as a basic flip-flop, a digital switch. Do you see now what I had yesterday, on looking at reflections in the wine of the chalices of gods?? If you can build a flip-flop using a 555 timer, why not scale it up? Why not just wire everything with 555s? Simply use a 555 timer in a monostable mode to create a controlled pulse output–effectively replacing your transistor switch.
A 555 timer in conjunction with another is an oscillator driving a transistor to drive another 555 timer and on and on in beautiful 555 inception to make a high speed switching transistor.
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