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.