祝・55周年！伝説のタイマーIC「555」が今なお愛される理由をEEVblogが徹底解説

電子工作界のレジェンド、555タイマーICが誕生から55年を迎えました。EEVblogによる記念動画では、なぜこのシンプルなチップが半世紀以上経った今もなお、世界中のエンジニアに愛され続けているのか、その魅力と歴史が深掘りされています。

5:55 video released on May 5th, as per description :)

For something feeling like a fairly specific IC, I remember seeing many projects that use it throughout the years in wacky ways - and seeing it makes me happy to know that the sentiment for this little piece is shared.

Oh god I feel old. I remember being an excited schoolboy thinking how magic this was when it debuted.

Built an atari punk console using these with my late father. Still have it hanging on my wall in a shadow box.

Big Clive is currently livestreaming to celebrate the 555's birthday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzNjFJdaw_I (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzNjFJdaw_I)

I still have the Forrest Mims III Radio Shack "555 Engineer's Mini-Notebook" somewhere in my basement. And rumor has it that Sammy Hagar can't drive 555 because his car just isn't fast enough!

As a kid I didn’t understand what the 555 timer chip on the Apple II disk controller was doing but I learned the hard way that when you misalign the pins on the drive connector cable and the 555 chip releases its blue smoke you can’t use the drive anymore :(

I used one of these to win an inter-school science competition when I was ~13. It was a minute timer. The competition board doubted I had built it all myself, so they plonked it down in front of me and demanded I draw the circuit diagram in front of them.

The 555 timer is still the most popular chip that hobbyists add to their parts inventory (see rankings at https://partsbox.com/ecdb.html (https://partsbox.com/ecdb.html)). I find this both interesting and curious — I'd say it has mostly nostalgic value at this point. Almost every practical problem today is better solved by something else. And yet it persists, I guess mostly because of beginner tutorials and first LED blinky circuits.

One nice thing about the 555 is that at least it aged well and still is very usable in those beginner tutorials. Unlike for example the uA741 which no one should use.

Evil Mad Scientist makes a giant, discrete version as a soldering kit:

https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/tinykitlist/6... (https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/tinykitlist/652)

Very cool. (Looks like it uses 26 transistors. I assume the die is similar.)

You can learn about the origin of the 555 timer from its creator in his free book here: http://www.designinganalogchips.com/ (http://www.designinganalogchips.com/)

Fun fact: his original concept needed 9 pins and therefore was going be forced to have a 14 pin package. A late epiphany got it down to the 8 pin version we know today.