I have worked as a electronic technician for about 20 years. But today I learned exactly the operation of 555 by watching after this video. Thank you very much. ❤❤❤❤ Please do the next episode soon ❤❤❤
One of the best explanation of 555 timer. Only gives relevant information at appropriate times and being clear with circuit function without being too technical
I remember years ago troubleshooting a circuit an engineer made using a 555 chip for an up/down volume control on a microphone. It seemed to use PWM to vary the volume to the speakers using a momentary contact switch, spring center was the off position. It was quite an ingenious use of simple parts.
@@jstro-hobbytech Yes, it's been around a long time. Released by Signetics in 1972. It had its 50th anniversary in 2022. I remember wiring up circuits on a breadboard in the 80s using one of those Radio Shack Engineer's Mini-Notebooks by Forrest Mims III for the 555 timer chip.
Holy Moly the Radio Shack Mini notebooks... Tandy for us in the UK, but I still think they were titled 'Radio Shack'. Forrest Mims blimey!.@@electronixTech
Used to love Tandy's but it failed when I was a kid I'd of been in there daily 😂😭😂 .... Maplin was brilliant before eBay killed it and prices went ridiculous 😂
Great video. A much needed breath of fresh air, especially compared to alot of other electronics videos which mainly consist of coding and a few pre-made modules getting slapped together with a raspberry pi or arduino. Definitely keep those videos coming 👍
More please! I think anyone starting out in electronics would enjoy all the things the 555 can do with just simple circuits. I had fun as a kid using one as a analog-digital converter with a speaker.
With microcontrollers having gotten so cheap, the 555 seems to have disappeared from almost all commercial uses. But in my opinion it is still the best "first" chip for someone learning electronics after having understood basic components like resistors, capacitors, diodes and transistors (comparators and opamps would be the next in line after the 555). It's really robust (doesn't go up in smoke like many opamps do when they "latch up") and can drive a decent load directly. It has tons of different modes of operation to try out, with immediate results on changes, as you have shown perfectly in this video. Your explanations were spot on "what you need to know". And even though I tinkered a lot with the 555 and built many not-so-common 555 circuits, including those messing with pin 5, I still learned something new from your video. I never connected a blinking LED to pin 5! Maybe because I never had a blinking LED in the first place, as when I needed a blinking LED I built a circuit with a 555 😅.
As usual you find a way to explain a system much clearer than how I originally learned it. Lol. Thanks again! Much simpler way to explain than how I had it taught to me years ago. There was a helluva lot more going on (internal transistors and resistors drawn) and it just restricted my ability to retain each pins purpose. I enjoy learning an ICs internal functions but not when it's a new concept I want to retain and start experimenting with! This should really help a lot of people both in the hobby already and those just experiencing their first intro to the venerable 555!
DiodeGoneWild, what I love about you is that your understanding of electronics works exactly like mine! (level aside) Pros don't understand this reasoning, but you do, and watching you is always such a relief 😌 Your explanation to me was 1000 times better than any document I could find online. P.S: don't worry this is no declaration of love 😂 but if you ever read this, just know you've been my main inspiration for years! Keep up your amazing work!
WOW!!! Really great way to explain the 555 functionality and application. The hand drawing and walking through it was great. This was way better than walking through the functional blocks of the internals of the chip.
This is definitely where you start. Them blinkin lights. I'll tell you what I wished I'd heard when I started, electronics is the art of waveform shaping. That's all it really is. You take a signal of one characteristic and change it into something else. That sums it up neatly. Here you're taking DC and making a square wave. So you're turning a straight flat line into one that goes up and down. So just keep that thought in mind to maintain perspective.
Fantastic! More like this please DGW, common chip function with example circuits. I will have to watch that video 3 or 4 times to absorb all the information.
Great tutorial! Always wondered what pin 5 did, could never find a very good explanation for its purpose, just "You should add a capacitor between it and ground" but never *why*
Haha you're right man. It was one of the first ics i ever learned to use. I have a giant one made using transistors on a piece of perfboard. Completely pointless but was fun to figure out. Took me forever picking away at it without a schematic. Like 2 years haha
One of the best I have seen about 555 IC. Amazing. I would like to see more clips like this. In fact these clips are very educational for beginners like me.
Nice demonstration. I have used the 555 a lot. Mostly for oscillators. It'so simple as it only requires 1-2 resistors and a capacitor in most cases. I mostly use the LMC555 or TLC555 as they need very much less supply current (max recommended supply voltage for LMC555 is just 12 V, not 15 V though - but it works within specifications down to 1,5 V! - so great for low voltage applications. The TLC works all the way from 2-15 V). The output on those cant source and sink as much current as the NE555 though - so if using the 555 for something like that beeper or to for example drive small MOSFETs directly without a gate drive, the NE555 might be better - otherwise a simple amplifier/gate drive circuit will be needed. Connecting the triangular wave on pin 2-6 to one of the inputs of a comparator, is a simple way to get voltage controlled PWM (controlled by a voltage applied to the other input of the comparator). This can be used to build DC/DC converters, switching power supplies and even inverters or class D amplifiers - as the feedback (or a control signal such as the output from a low frequency sine wave oscillator or an audio signal) can act on that comparator input to rapidly control the duty cycle.
You can actually make a radio transmitter from a 555, was one of the first circuits I made to check out an old oscilloscope, said about 3 mhz on screen, I tuned a radio in and it was spot on! 👍😎😁
Danke! Thanks for this piece of classic!❤ Would like to see more basic circuits. But also more advanced onces.. Besides that: I'm highly interested in crazy contraptions of several 555's for PWMs with stable/adjustable frequency and adjustable DutyCycle for example LEDs and motorspeed control. I like the 555Soundmaschines, but on mobile phone audio the high frequency sound is a real pain for my ears, maybe half the audio time for this? Once upon a time i had seen 3 555s with different frequencys feed to an RGB LED🎉😂
Nice lesson. You should do more of this. Break it down to One or Two circuits, getting more complex each time, you could do a series. I use the National Instruments simulator, but you could use the free Spice model software too.
Nice explanation I brought some a while back to see if its any good for boost converter to run LEDs neva got round to it 😂 and found out theres better chips for the job 😂
Have you seen the serial input or controlled servos for kids projects? It would be cool to hack normal servos to turn them into serial ones you can daisy chain using only passive components to fontrol them.
Why you don't respond sir!!?? Many times I said please make a bloody long video about *how to calculate the winding turns of a FLYBACK smps for different output powers (DIY)* and make it from beginning, selecting the power transistor, current limiting resistor and also explain the role of the MYSTERIOUS R and C in the feedback network and also to. Calculate their values!! I know their roles a bit but I'm not sure whether it is responsible for setting the operating frequency or not.* So Gods Swear please please please make a bloody longvideo on this. Love you from India sir. 🖤
As a kid in the 80s I played with that IC quite a bit. Back in the 80s here in the States an electronics store named Radio Shack sold a book written by Forest Mims called the Mini-Notebook 555 Timer IC Circuits, actually they sold quite a few different Mini Engineering Note books written by Forest Mins and I had them all. Thanks for helping me relive my childhood for a little while, those sure were the good old days.
This was an EXCELLENT video, I really enjoyed this! It was thorough and concise, with complementary visuals and a sensible progression of detail. Thank you for making and sharing!
I think the two tone siren using a blinking led on the control pin is just genius, the most easy yet creative idea seen with 555 project. Keep goin like this diode💪💪💪
Absolut GREAT! The first time I understood all and can remember! Please more circuits as you said at the end! Bistabile-circuit and Monostable-circuit... Thanks in advance!
7:16 It's not that simple. The output is switched by two complementar transistors, so it delivers different current in the Hi and Lo state, which results in a fact, that that circuit does not oscillate with 50% duty cycle, but it's slightly off of this point. You can easily observe this behavior at 6:01 - the red LED is illuminated for shorter period of time than the green one. I ran into this issue when I tried to build an oscillator with about 50%. I compensated this behavior by adding 470Ω pull-up resistor to the output pin of that IC, which gave me (in my particular case) 50% duty cycle, but that's not the right solution to this problem, because 555s manufactured by different manufacturers require different compensations. 15:21 Adding that diode also adds some voltage drop on it. It's not a huge problem as long as you are far from 50% duty cycle, but if you want to hit exactly 50% (or just want to have that thing configurable to almost any duty cycle), you need to compensate that voltage drop by another similar diode in the discharge path.
I have been using 555 for the last 30 years and must say that watching this, brings back so many good memories. Thank you for a great video - very comprehensive! And a beautiful cat! 😻
When I drive relays directly with a NE555, I sometimes bridge pin3 and pin7, this way the NE555 can theoretically sink more current. This only works for certain types of circuits that don't require the discharge pin. It only works for sinking current and not for sourcing current, because pin7 can only sink current. It makes a nice relay driver with hypothesis, like a LDR dusk circuit.
Heyy Daniel ,, could you please explain to us how 555chip gives us negative voltages, i did not get it, we can by using 555chip make voltage multiplier or Generating a negative voltage using diodes and capacitors ... i did not understand this. thaaaaanks.
Great explanation! 👍 But 555 might be too "integrated" for a beginner, two comparators and an RS flip-flop inside. I recommend making own oscillators, latches/flip-flops, etc. using Schmitt trigger NAND gates, like 4093. Basic blocks. You can make everything with NAND gates :)
Ah, good old 555 timer. This chip saved me from throwing away microcontrollers when programming wrong oscillator fusebit settings in AVR8 MCU's. Fun part: I used it in low power "regulated" DC/DC converters and as an external ADC in a MCUs, which had only 8 bit timer and external interrupt pin (converting pulse time to voltage) but that was in the 90's, when appropriate IC's or microcontrollers with rich set of peripherals were too expensive for me.
You're providing good educational content for newcomers. What about something from the analogue department? A Wien bridge oscillator would be a good example....
I love 555 timers. You bought back memories of when I used them in their different states back in my electronic education days. However you have shown me things I never knew they could do! Thank you once again! PS do you ever have one of those moments when you think 'Why?', I ask because for the love of me I can not remember why I ended up buying a tube of 25 of them for .... some reason .. and now I have forgotten what I was going to do with them 🤣
I bought a load of 555 timer ICs back in the year of the pandemic, I forget why, and what for, but I did make a flasher relay out of at least one of them, which gives me 49 left to work out what to do with... :P
An excellent introduction to the ubiquitous 555 timer. A simple, overview of how it works and how to make it do some things. I've seen many videos and people use a micro controller (or RPi) for doing a task that could easily be done with a 555 timer, so it's good to have a beginner guide out there since maybe the very affordable/cheap 555 could do what someone needs without having to use a micro controller or RPi just for something simple. 555 definitely will trump most in terms of reliability and simplicity (KISS - keep it simple, stupid!) :)
