Useful chips, used in printer for pin driver, also great for stepper motor drive. Where logic meets the outside world, 7-segs, lamps, motors, etc. Good thing about is output isn't a perfect 'on' which is handy.
If i recall correctly, you can parrallel 2 inputs/outputs for 600+1A output. Used it to drive some leds on a fishtank triggered from an esp32. Was overkill but the ic is a nice form factor.
I have replaced these in modern dehumidifiers (GE, Honeywell etc) and portable air conditioning units. These are used to drive relays to actuate the compressor, fan motor and other devices that I can't think of at the moment. This makes me believe that they are still commonly used today.
Ah the ULN2003, pretty popular and useful. Combine that with a numitron / minitron (segmented incandescent display) or even some bulbs or strings of LEDs in a larger 7-seg... driving it from a 7448 etc. BCD to 7seg decoder, common cathode. I prefer the 2803 though, one of my to-go chips whenever you need to drive some relays, solenoid valves etc. Two of these combined with a MCP23017 (I2C) or 23S17 (SPI) are a mighty useful combination, 16 open collector channels... and you can scale that up to 8 23017s on a single bus. That's what made the rpi2caster project (controlling a Monotype composition caster with a Raspberry Pi) possible.
Useful part... but i never used one of them - always discrete Transistors, that is what i do a lot. Perhalps this is because when i started electronics those IC have been hard to find and expensive while simple transistors like BC337 / BC327 every small electronics shop around had in stock at a reasonable price...
Yes, but in the 80s and even 90s we only had some tiny shops and classic mail order catalogs with mostly high postage costs and minimum order quantities and complicated payment because they were abroad 😕@@onecircuit-as
Awesome. I've seen these in a few control boards in the lab equipment I work on (incubators, glassware washers) driving motors, relays, solenoid valves. I keep a few on hand as well. I had one of these fail once in a glassware washer - attempted to power it on and every single output device (wash pump, blower, valves, etc) was turned on momentarily in a loud crescendo and then the magic smoke was released.
Back in the day they were maybe more useful but they lack output protection and have a high saturation voltage so I wouldn't use them today to drive high current loads, there are protected drivers available
One of my favourite ICs. Stable, predictable, great protection, daisy chain outputs for bigger current. I think I’ve done a couple of vids on these now. 👍😀
For nixies etc. there's a high voltage BCD decoder in one of the two classic logic series . There's also 7446 for higher voltage 7-segment displays, though still not for the old NASA countdown sign at KSC (now replaced with a giant video screen).
We just had a new heat pump unit installed to replace the old compressor of the ac unit for our house and the controller board has a bunch of ULN2003 on it
