Equivalent of an A55 Transistor

To toot my own horn a little in this respect, I recently had occasion to build something that could switch power to a camera on for something like ten seconds every two minutes (neither time interval needed to be exact). This was because the things in the field would be battery-powered and we wanted to save battery, and needed only time-lapse photography anyway. (The purpose was to create a time-lapse movie of a construction project.) My first reaction was a 555 with a few external discretes to convert the 555's voltage-level output into a current switch. Built it, and it worked. (I used bipolar transistors for the switching because that's what I know; a FET would maybe have made more sense as the switch.) Then someone mentioned doing it with an Arduino or something of that ilk. But, on investigating, the uP solution would have drawn enough power to significantly impair battery life as compared to my circuit. Apparently my first reaction was the righter answer. :) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B