General > General Technical Chat
Is the 555 still a viable IC?
SiliconWizard:
--- Quote from: AndyBeez on February 20, 2024, 01:05:43 pm ---I recently encountered a 556 (dual 555) on a plug-in mouse scarer. One stage provided a low frequency pulse that gated the second stage; which ran 40KHz into a transducer. The DIL packaged chip was dated c.2010, so there were a few analogue diehards out there. But they possibly have long retired, leaving mouse scaring to the Arduino kids.
--- End quote ---
Arduino? Nah! You need at least a RPi 5 for this and the WiringPi library. Probably Python to run on top of this, all in all requiring nearly 1GB of RAM.
But, then you'll be tickling true progress. You can even connect to some cloud provider to log the pin toggling action that happened locally and see that on a nice graph on your mobile phone.
55... what? You said? :-DD
tszaboo:
--- Quote from: baldurn on February 22, 2024, 01:17:10 am ---That board also needs to be mounted in some product. The same worker or robot can do the programming. You will have a jig where you drop the board for a few seconds until a LED turns green. The worker will be mounting a board while the jig is programming the next board. This way the worker will never wait on the programmer and the extra working time per item is a few seconds at worst.
And really? Expensive to make a firmware that reads three ADCs and programs three PWM outputs accordingly? Anyone can do that in less than an hour, even a total beginner.
This is a strange product by the way. All popular multicolored LED strips these days are WS2812 based, which you could not possibly program without using a MCU. This simple MCU could do it however and with even less components (no MOSFETs).
Also the price for the programmer is really nothing as you can make your own using nothing but an old Arduino or Raspberry Pi Pico.
The Raspberry Pi Pico debug probe at €13: https://raspberrypi.dk/en/product/raspberry-pi-debug-probe/
If that is too much, you can get the Raspberry Pi Pico at €4 https://raspberrypi.dk/en/product/raspberry-pi-pico/ and download the software yourself. Takes less than 5 minutes to convert that thing to a debug probe.
Then all you need is a cable with three pogo pins and a small jig. I would 3D print it. I could easily design and print such a thing in about an hour.
--- End quote ---
I take it you never had to setup a real production line?
I've sit behind production workers with stopwatch to optimize speed. Even if you as an engineer can demonstrate it very quickly what to do, that's not sustainable on the long term. It's not possible to make 15 second tack times 8 hours straight doing the same boring task without mistakes. Also programming is often times a separate step at a separate station, because they will simply skip the test if there isn't something blocking them to do so. And then you might need to rework hours of production.
You also don't use "Arduino or something like that" to program in a real production facility. Each testing JIG is valued at ~5K EUR just because engineers had to design it, order it put it together. Also production programmers are a LOT faster. And you didn't address the bottom line, that I can make the circuit for ~3 cents in components.
PlainName:
--- Quote --- All popular multicolored LED strips these days are WS2812 based, which you could not possibly program without using a MCU.
--- End quote ---
Hope I've joined the right pedant's thread...
You could use WS2812 sans MCU with some memory and a shift register, perhaps a 74HC165N. Of course, you would need have a clock, and a 555 could be great for that :)
jonovid:
by the bucketload from Shenzhen Yes.
TimFox:
I believe the 2N2646 unijunction transistor is still available, but more expensive than a 555.
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