555 Teardown Isn’t Just A Good Time, It’s To Die For

January 25, 2022 by Ryan Flowers 10 Comments

It seems only appropriate that hot on the heels of the conclusion of Hackaday’s 555 Timer Contest that [Ken Shirriff] posts a silicon die teardown of an early version of a hacker’s favorite chip, the 555.

Starting with a mystery chip from January 1973, [Eric Schlaepfer] painstakingly sanded down the package to reveal the die, which he deemed to be a 555 timer. Why didn’t they know it was a 555 timer to start? Because the package was not marked with “555” but rather some other marks that you can see in the blog post.

In addition to a great explanation of how the 555 works in general, [Ken] has taken a microscopic look at the 555 die itself. The schematic of a 555 is easily available, and [Ken] identifies not just sections of the die but individual components. He goes further yet by explaining how the PNP and NPN resistors are constructed in silicon. There’s also a nice and juicy bit of insight into the resistors in the IC, but we won’t spoil it here.

Be sure to show your love for the winners of the 555 contest, or at the very least check out the project that took the stop spot: a giant sized 555 that you don’t need a microscope to see inside of.

Hackaday Podcast 152: 555 Timer Extravaganza, EMF Chip Glitching 3 Ways, A Magnetic Mechanical Keyboard, And The Best Tricorder Ever

January 21, 2022 by Tom Nardi No comments

Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi as they bring you up to speed on the best stories and projects from the week. There’s some pretty unfortunate news for the physical media aficionados in the audience, but if you’re particularly keen on 50 year old integrated circuits, you’ll love hearing about the winners of the 555 Timer Contest. We’ll take a look at a singing circuit sculpture powered by the ESP32, extol the virtues of 3D printed switches, follow one hacker’s dream of building the ultimate Star Trek tricorder prop, and try to wrap our heads around how electronic devices can be jolted into submission. Stick around to the end as we take a close look at some extraordinary claims about sniffing out computer viruses, and wrap things up by wondering why everyone is trying to drive so far.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct Download (65 MB)

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Congratulations Winners Of The 555 Timer Contest!

January 20, 2022 by Elliot Williams 25 Comments

Sometimes the best inspiration is limitation. The 555 timer does “one thing” — compares a voltage to a couple thresholds and outputs a signal accordingly. It’s two comparators, a voltage ladder, and a flip-flop. And yet, it’s the most sold single chip of all time, celebrating its 50th birthday this year! So when Hackaday runs a 555 Timer Contest, hackers of all stripes come out with their best work to show their love for the Little DIP That Could.

The Winners

Far and away the favorite entry was the Giant 555 Timer by [Rudraksha Vegad]. Every one of our judges rated it in the top five, and it took top honors twice. On its face, this is a simple “giant 555 in a box” build, but have a look under the hood. Each sub-module that makes up the 555 — comparators, flip-flop, and amplifier — are made from salvaged discrete parts in actual breadboard fashion, soldered to brass nails hammered into wood. As an end product, it’s a nice piece of woodworking, but as a process of creation, it’s a masterwork in understanding the 555 at its deepest level. We should all make one!

The Menorah555 is a simple design with some very nice tricks up its sleeve. Perhaps the cutest of which is pulling the central candle out and lighting the others with it — a trick that involves a supercapacitor and reed switches. Each of the candle lighting circuits, however, use a 555 timer both for its intended purpose of providing a timed power-on reset pulse, and another 555 is used as a simple flip-flop. It’s a slick design, and a great user interaction.

The Cyclotone Mechanical Punk Console Sequencer is a rotating tower of circuit sculpture and noisemakers. This one looks great, is amazingly well documented in the video series, and uses a billion clever little tricks along the way. The 555’s role? Each of the four levels is the classic Atari Punk Console circuit.

All three of these projects win a $150 shopping spree at Digi-Key. That’s a lot of timers!

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Doing The Right Thing The Wrong Way: Dumping STM8 Firmware With 555 Timers

January 15, 2022 by Ryan Flowers 4 Comments

When [Jarrett] decided to enter the 555 Contest that’s just wrapped up, he leaned up on an idea that’s been rattling around in his noggin for a few years: Using 555 timers to trigger a firmware dump on a microcontroller. It’s definitely the wrong tool for the job, but [Jarrett] got it working and documented it nicely at Hackaday.io.

The premise is that by interrupting the power supply to the STM8 microcontroller at just the right time and for just the right duration, it would skip the instruction telling it not to allow its firmware to be read. Time and duration… things the 555 is well known for being capable of. There was a problem, however.

The first problem is that the duration was to be measured in nanoseconds. A garden variety 555 has can only pulse down to about 10 microseconds. The solution? Well, you’ll have to read the excellent project page to find out, but don’t worry- it’s a 555. The second problem? He was using 555’s!

Was [Jarrett] successful? After much fiddling and twiddling, he absolutely was! The old firmware was dumped from the STM8 processor and the new firmware could be flashed with impunity.

This 555 contest has seen some truly epic entries, including but not limited to this 555 based accordion like instrument that this particular author just can’t get enough of!

Work The World On A 555

January 13, 2022 by Jenny List 14 Comments

Over the years the humble 555 timer has been used in so many unexpected places, but there’s a project from [Frank Latos] which we think may be a first. On a piece of stripboard sit a pair of 555s, and instead of the usual passives there are a set of LC circuits. This is no timer, instead it’s a CW (Morse) transmitter for the 80 metre amateur radio band.

One 555 is configured as a feedback oscillator through a toroidal transformer with a tuned circuit to set the frequency of oscillation. The other takes an inverted input from the oscillator to produce complimentary push-pull outputs from both 555s, which are fed to another transformer that in turn feeds a low-pass filter and thus the antenna.

Free-running squarewave oscillators of this type are not unusual for the lower HF bands, but we think this is the first 555 design we’ve seen. As shown it doesn’t produce much in the way of RF power, but remembering half-decent motor drivers using a 556 dual timer we think that selection of one of the more powerful 555 variants might deliver some more punch. We commend his creativity though, and hope he can get that all-important entry in the log to prove it works.

If you’re curious about low-power radio operation, it’s something we’ve explored before.

555 Timer On Its Own In Electronic Dice

January 8, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 18 Comments

One of the most common clichés around here is that a piece of equipment chosen for a project is always too advanced. If a Raspberry Pi was used, someone will say they should have used an Arduino. If they use an Arduino, it should have been an ATtiny. And of course, if an ATtiny was used, there should have simply been a 555 timer. This time, however, [Tim] decided to actually show how this can be done by removing some of the integrated circuits from an electronic dice and relying entirely on the 555 timer for his build.

The electronic dice that [Tim] has on hand makes use of two main ICs: a NE555 and a CD4017 which is a decade counter/divider used for cycling through states. In order to bring the 555 to the forefront of this build, he scraps the CD4017 and adds an array of 555 timers. These are used to generate the clock signals necessary for this build but can also be arranged to form logic circuits. This comes at a great cost, however. The 555 chips take up an unnecessarily large area on the PCB (even though these are small surface-mount chips), consume an incredible amount of power, and are very slow. That’s fine for an electronic dice-rolling machine like this one, but that’s probably where [Tim] will leave this idea.

The 555 timer is a surprisingly versatile chip, and this project shows that there is some element of truth to the folks claiming that projects need naught but a few 555s. We’ve seen entire CPUs built using nothing but 555s, and even a classic project that uses a 555 timer to balance a robot.

555 Timer Contest Entry: A Digital Counter With Nothing But 555s

January 6, 2022 by Dan Maloney 11 Comments

With a 555 on the BOM, you never know what you’re going to get. With 40 of the versatile timer chips in a build, you might just get something completely unexpected, like this 555-based eight-bit digital counter.

This one comes to us by way of [Astronomermike], who chose to make a digital circuit with nothing but 555s and a largish handful of passives as his entry in the current 555 Timer Contest. The ubiquitous timer chip is not exactly the first chip that comes to mind for digital applications, but it does contain an SR latch, which only requires a little persuasion to become a JK flip flop. His initial design for the flip flop that would form the core of the circuit had a pair of 555s surrounded with a bunch of OR gates and inverters — within the rules of the contest but hardly in its spirit. Luckily, the 555 makes a fine inverter too, and along with some diode-resistor OR gates, the basic counter module was born.

The video below shows the design and build, as well as the trip down the troubleshooting rabbit hole courtesy of a bad breadboard. Each half-nibble stage of the 8-bit counter occupies a full breadboard with ten 555s; the whole 40-chip string actually works and looks pretty cool doing it.

Truth be told, this is exactly the kind of thing we had in mind when dreaming up this year’s 555 contest, so good on [Astronomermike] for thinking outside the box for this one. To see what other uses people have found for the chip that keeps on giving, or to get your entry in before the deadline on January 10, head over to the contest page.

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