General > General Technical Chat
Where have you actually come across a 555 timer in the wild?
setq:
I've seen a 555, 311, BD13x based naive boost converter in what appears to have been a display driver for a VFD (it was skip dived). Looked 1980s vintage so might have been cheaper than a dedicated IC at the time. The display was smashed but was quite large. I built a replica of it a few months ago replacing the BD transistor with an IRF510 as it looked interesting and it's possible to get a good 500mA at 30v out of the circuit with some tweaks without anything exploding. Didn't measure the efficiency however. Picture below - no schematic I didn't bother:
555 on left running at ~50khz. Voltage ref at top. LM311 comparator in middle. IRF510 top right with inductor. Voltage divider at bottom. If the voltage gets too high it turns the oscillator off - dumb as chips.
MadTux:
HP 8662/8663A SMPS controller also has an NE555 in it.
Found it a bit weird, cheap NE555 in a 40 or 75k$ signal generator
timb:
--- Quote from: Synthetase on July 25, 2016, 04:28:22 pm ---Used to find them in old joysticks. The stick moves a linear pot, changing the pulse freq of the 555.
I've also seen them in electric fence controllers for pulse generation.
--- End quote ---
Yeah, surprised this wasn't mentioned sooner. I think Woz pioneered this method with the Apple II joysticks. If I remember correctly, it was a 556 and the joystick was actually two potentiometers. The CPU would time the incoming pulses to determine position.
A very elegant solution!
Enigma-man:
Here's my very recently constructed 555 based Nixie power supply to run some 1.5" Beckman 7 segment displays as may have been seen in
another thread.
whitevamp:
just yesterday i had opened up a Jensen 3022 LX car stereo amp, im guessing circa late 80's - 90's. and found this little gem in there. a ne555.
http://elektrotanya.com/jensen_xa_3022_lx_sch.pdf/download.html
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sA30dH34P9BgDo_b-63wjXetkeeazWKl5QKfJTQ5ELg/edit
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