16 Apr
2012
16 Apr
'12
1:09 p.m.
On Apr 16, 2012, at 3:02 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
Well, yes. It is a figurative Swiss Army Knife of interesting bits.
It's kind of a shame that it's nearly universally referred to as a
555 *timer* when in fact it's really an interesting, connected
assembly of comparators, a BJT, a flip-flop and a resistor ladder.
I think the "timer" moniker keeps people from really employing their
wetware when designing things with it.
You could even use it as a simple PLL core, though I'm not sure how
much quality you'd get out of it.
- Dave
Indeed. The
555 is a great solution to a great many things, and
It's amazing how many peole think it's useful for astable (oscillator)
and monostable (timer) circuits only. I've used it as a bistable and as a
schmitt trigger too.
The full 555 data sheet is something few people (not here, I hope!) seem
to have read, they just use the standard 'cookbook' circuits. If you read
and understnad the datasheet you can fidn any other ways to use it.