CONGRATULATIONS WINNERS OF THE 555 TIMER CONTEST!
often the very best motivation is limitation. The 555 timer does “one thing” — compares a voltage to a couple thresholds as well as outputs a signal accordingly. It’s two comparators, a voltage ladder, as well as a flip-flop. as well as yet, it’s the most offered 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 finest work to show their like for the bit DIP That Could.
The Winners
Far as well as away the preferred entry was the gigantic 555 Timer by [Rudraksha Vegad]. Every one of our judges rated it in the top five, as well as it took top honors twice. On its face, this is a basic “giant 555 in a box” build, however have a look under the hood. Each sub-module that makes up the 555 — comparators, flip-flop, as well as amplifier — are made of salvaged discrete parts in actual breadboard fashion, soldered to brass nails hammered into wood. As an end product, it’s a great piece of woodworking, however as a process of creation, it’s a masterwork in comprehending the 555 at its deepest level. We must all make one!
The Menorah555 is a basic style with some extremely great techniques up its sleeve. maybe the cutest of which is pulling the central candle out as well as illumination the others with it — a technique that includes a supercapacitor as well as reed switches. Each of the candle illumination circuits, however, utilize a 555 timer both for its meant function of supplying a timed power-on reset pulse, as well as one more 555 is utilized as a basic flip-flop. It’s a slick design, as well as a fantastic individual interaction.
The Cyclotone Mechanical Punk Console Sequencer is a turning tower of circuit sculpture as well as noisemakers. this looks great, is amazingly well documented in the video series, as well as utilizes a billion creative bit techniques along the way. The 555’s role? Each of the four levels is the traditional Atari Punk Console circuit.
All three of these jobs win a $150 buying spree at Digi-Key. That’s a great deal of timers!
Hello World!
You had one task — blink an LED with the 555. [Sami] made a PCB of an Audi e-tron for a departing colleague. What can we say? The LEDs blink with 555s, as well as the board looks snazzy.
Bandwidth Buster
Turns out that you can make a 4 MHz radio transmitter out of just two LMC555s. (They’re the quick ones.) Indeed, the circuit’s only semiconductors are the two 555s. One produces the provider frequency, as well as the other just inverts the signal. The two of them in tandem type a push-pull amplifier, for “maximum” power. 4 MHz with a 555 oscillator isn’t bad!
Chiptunes
One of the strangest hacks, hands-down, is the Accordeonator. It’s constructed out of a CD drive, as well as pulling the CD sled in as well as out turns the drive motor, which is utilized as a generator to power the whole circuit. seven buttons link up timing resistors to the 555, which makes the music. extremely cool!
Shouldn’t have utilized a 555
If there are times when you must have, there need to likewise be times when you shouldn’t, right? For instance, you most likely shouldn’t utilize 555s as stepper motor drivers, or as counters, in this leaping-frog LED sculpture. A 555 absolutely doesn’t have the exact temporal resolution needed to glitch an STM8’s read-only security bit, right? definitely you wouldn’t bit-bang the DMX512 serial protocol or make a serial ADC with a 555? as well as if you shouldn’t utilize a 555, does it count if you turn an ATTiny85 into a drop-in replacement?
This classification didn’t disappoint, as well as we’re not surprised. tell Hackaday visitors what they can’t do, as well as they’ll do it!
Art for Art’s Sake
Finally, our judges truly liked CS 555, a wholly circuit-sculpture discrete 555, as well as the Spirit of the ’62 Rambler Nixie Clock which animates an old car’s dash as if driven by a ghostly force. Of program it’s a 555.
WTF Award
We honestly didn’t understand that we needed an honorable mention classification for making your own 20-pin 555-timer based silicon, however obviously we did. [Adrian Freed] has a pair of new 555-based IC designs that include other features on-chip: one with eight output buffers as well as a counter, as well as one more with the digestive tracts of a linear-feedback shift register inside. His demo example? Blinking a lot of LEDs, naturally. We’d like to see a lot more detail about this job in the future.
… as well as More
Kudos to all entrants in the contest! You must truly take a long time to search all of the entries, as well as not just those that resonated a lot of with us. since who knows, you may just discover yourself stranded on a desert island, with only a crate of 555s on hand, as well as requirement to reconstruct contemporary society.
Thanks once again to our sponsor Digi-Key for the prizes as well as the support!