A little bit (scolding a beginner in this way is never acceptable), but I do feel like the 555 is really overrepresented in electronics learning materials. It's a quirky little chip, so learning about it doesn't really teach you much (most of the time it's just 'hook it up like so and it does this!', not 'here's how comparators and oscillators actually work'), and it's also now almost never the best or even a good solution for any of the problems it solves.
That's true but because it is a quirky useful little chip it is for many people their first exposure to integrated circuits that are a bit more 'analog' than gates and micro controllers. Opamps are the other gateway drug I guess.
It's excellent teaching material for that reason alone, you do learn about it if you try to understand what makes it tick (there are plenty of articles about it, including blown up versions). I agree it is not the best solution for most applications but I'm happy to admit that I've actually used it in production designs (more than once, actually) where it made good sense to have a component that didn't have to be programmed. If you have a soft component on a board and a spare io line then you are usually better off doing it in some different way.
I've seen some interesting applications of 555s that would have taken a lot more hardware otherwise, one of which was an oven controller with used a thermistor to directly affect the PWM output of a 555.
It's true. They're not useful for anything not hooked up to mains.
I was meaning to add footstep-activated lights to my stairs using vibration sensors and 555 timers, but then I learned that if I tried to operate them from a battery, the 555 would drain it in hours, while a much more sophisticated ESP32-c3, would last a month in sleep mode on two coin batteries or one li-ion in the same form factor all while being part of a development board that greatly increases idle current.
Yes, but a successful way to prevent people from going to office hours. People generally don't become professors because they care about teaching, and universities don't reward professors for teaching.
I ended up befriending a former Northrop RF Engineer and a (sadly) homeless genius who was involved in early silicon valley. Those two guys were incredibly impactful on me and got me all the way up to building RF equipment.
Very neat. I'm in the midst of some interesting hacking and I really regret giving away a lot of my workshop tools in the mid 90's when it all went to software. I still have a lot of hooks in electronics and such but I just couldn't justify lugging around a couple of cubic meters of parts stock & gear. But right now I'm seriously wondering whether that was a wise decision, on the other hand that world has definitely not stood still, and the prices have come down considerably. But I'd love to have my old frequency counter and pulse generator back :)
I'm really happy that you found an alternate path because such a put-down is terrible and should have never happened in any mature education institution.
A little bit (scolding a beginner in this way is never acceptable), but I do feel like the 555 is really overrepresented in electronics learning materials. It's a quirky little chip, so learning about it doesn't really teach you much (most of the time it's just 'hook it up like so and it does this!', not 'here's how comparators and oscillators actually work'), and it's also now almost never the best or even a good solution for any of the problems it solves.
That's true but because it is a quirky useful little chip it is for many people their first exposure to integrated circuits that are a bit more 'analog' than gates and micro controllers. Opamps are the other gateway drug I guess.
It's excellent teaching material for that reason alone, you do learn about it if you try to understand what makes it tick (there are plenty of articles about it, including blown up versions). I agree it is not the best solution for most applications but I'm happy to admit that I've actually used it in production designs (more than once, actually) where it made good sense to have a component that didn't have to be programmed. If you have a soft component on a board and a spare io line then you are usually better off doing it in some different way.
I've seen some interesting applications of 555s that would have taken a lot more hardware otherwise, one of which was an oven controller with used a thermistor to directly affect the PWM output of a 555.
It's true. They're not useful for anything not hooked up to mains.
I was meaning to add footstep-activated lights to my stairs using vibration sensors and 555 timers, but then I learned that if I tried to operate them from a battery, the 555 would drain it in hours, while a much more sophisticated ESP32-c3, would last a month in sleep mode on two coin batteries or one li-ion in the same form factor all while being part of a development board that greatly increases idle current.
Yes, but a successful way to prevent people from going to office hours. People generally don't become professors because they care about teaching, and universities don't reward professors for teaching.
I never went back to that engineering department.
I ended up befriending a former Northrop RF Engineer and a (sadly) homeless genius who was involved in early silicon valley. Those two guys were incredibly impactful on me and got me all the way up to building RF equipment.
Very neat. I'm in the midst of some interesting hacking and I really regret giving away a lot of my workshop tools in the mid 90's when it all went to software. I still have a lot of hooks in electronics and such but I just couldn't justify lugging around a couple of cubic meters of parts stock & gear. But right now I'm seriously wondering whether that was a wise decision, on the other hand that world has definitely not stood still, and the prices have come down considerably. But I'd love to have my old frequency counter and pulse generator back :)
I'm really happy that you found an alternate path because such a put-down is terrible and should have never happened in any mature education institution.