Gigantic 555 Footstool

The team at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories needed a footstool. Obviously not content with buying one, they came across the idea of building a 555 footstool.

After finding some dimension drawings of the 555 timer IC, the team scaled everything up 30 times. While a normal DIP-8 555 is around 0.4 inches long, the footstool is over a foot long and eight inches high. The stool was cut on a CNC mill out of 1/2″ plywood, glued together, and finally panted with the correct date code and the logo of Evil Mad Scientist Labs. The finished product is amazing. We’ve been looking for a nice table, and the idea of an 8 foot long wooden 64-pin Motorola 68000 is pretty appealing.

While there’s no electronics in the footstool, it’s not hard to imagine fabricating some aluminum pins and a hollow body so a huge, functional 555 could be built. It would be possible to use discreet components following the block diagram of the 555 to build a huge Atari Punk Console; the gigantic capacitors are fairly easy to build in any event.

38 thoughts on “Gigantic 555 Footstool

  1. Ha, I love it!

    Regarding a scaled up *functional* version. The original 555’s output driver can source/sink 200ma. When it switches, both source and sink transistors are momentarily active; resulting in a 200ma shoot-through.

    So when Brian suggested scaled-up electronics, I couldn’t help but imagine the incredibly nasty spikes it would cause if the output current were also scaled up proportionately. :)

  2. Where would YOUR legs go if you scaled up a 64 pin motorola 68000?

    Nice though, i could see a whole range of furniture based on this concept.

    How about capacitor coffee tables?

  3. If you want to add a working 555 circuit inside it, how about making it even more retro by making a 555 circuit out of tubes? It’s the right size to hold the tube components….

  4. Wikipedia says that there are more than a billion 555’s manufactured every year (and I have no reason to doubt it), that’s such a staggering number when you think about it.

    One word of criticism on this project though, I don’t think the thickness of the legs are to scale at all, but it’s not a big distraction and would require steel legs to be correct and maintain stability and somehow it looks OK as it is.

  5. I’m pretty sure the lead inductance would go through the roof if you tried to build an actual functional IC at that size.
    But since it’s just for fun, I suppose it doesn’t matter that much.

    1. I hate spelling comments! They just distract me from reading. I just overlook the mistake in the posting. But With such a useless spelling posting I mostly “have” to go back and look what is meant.
      Especially useless, if it contains mistakes itself. Like “world” vs. “word”.

  6. That thing looks like it’s way heavier than it needs to be. An electron tube version of a 555 timer inside wouldn’t be a bad idea for Winter comes around, and a space heater for the room is desired. I’d definitely would buy a cutting pattern for this if they would make one available. I’d hollow it out and build a poor man’s version of the Eden Pure room heater inside.

  7. Hello brian….
    Nice writeup about your other site that in the future you’re going to try and redirect traffic to….
    Oh, wait time machines don’t exist yet…. Oh well lets delay this comment until the end of July 2017….

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