Congratulations Winners of the 555 Timer Contest!

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!

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, and 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 fast ones.) Indeed, the circuit's only semiconductors are the two 555s. One creates the carrier frequency, and the other simply inverts the signal. The two of them in tandem form 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 made out of a CD drive, and pulling the CD sled in and out turns the drive motor, which is used as a generator to power the whole circuit. Seven buttons connect up timing resistors to the 555, which makes the music. Very cool!

Shouldn't Have Used a 555

If there are times when you should have, there must also be times when you shouldn't, right? For instance, you probably shouldn't use 555s as stepper motor drivers, or as counters, in this leaping-frog LED sculpture. A 555 definitely doesn't have the precise temporal resolution necessary to glitch an STM8's read-only protection bit, right? Certainly you wouldn't bit-bang the DMX512 serial protocol or make a serial ADC with a 555? And if you shouldn't use a 555, does it count if you turn an ATTiny85 into a drop-in replacement?

This category didn't disappoint, and we're not surprised. Tell Hackaday readers what they can't do, and they'll do it!

Art for Art's Sake

Finally, our judges really liked CS 555, a wholly circuit-sculpture discrete 555, and the Spirit of the '62 Rambler Nixie Clock which animates an old car's dash as if driven by a ghostly force. Of course it's a 555.

WTF Award

We honestly didn't know that we needed an honorable mention category for making your own 20-pin 555-timer based silicon , but apparently we did. [Adrian Freed] has a pair of new 555-based IC designs that include other features on-chip: one with eight output buffers and a counter, and another with the guts of a linear-feedback shift register inside. His demo example? Blinking a bunch of LEDs, naturally. We'd love to see more detail about this project in the future.

… and More

Kudos to all entrants in the contest! You should really take some time to browse all of the entries, and not just those that resonated most with us. Because who knows, you might just find yourself stranded on a desert island, with only a crate of 555s on hand, and need to reconstruct modern society.

Thanks again to our sponsor Digi-Key for the prizes and the support!

#classichacks #hackadaycolumns #news #555timer #555timercontest #winners

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

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 nano seconds. 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!

#classichacks #555timercontest #firmwaredump #glitching #stm8

555 Timer Contest Entry: A Digital Counter with Nothing but 555s

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.

#contests #hardware #555 #555timercontest #8bitcounter #breadboard #jkflipflop #srlatch

The 555 Timer Contest Returns!

It's back! The 555 timer contest wants to see you do something cool with the 555 timer chip. At stake is the adulation of electronics geeks everywhere. Three top winners will be awarded a $150 shopping spree in the Digi-Key warehouse thanks to Digi-Key's generous sponsorship of this contest.

Memory Lane

First a bit of history… "the 555 timer contest" that sticks out in our minds is the one conceived of by [Jeri Ellsworth] and assisted by [Chris Gammell] that took place a decade ago. It was a runaway freight train from the start, with numerous sponsors putting up prizes and a list of celebrity judges. Surely it is not the only contest based around the 555 timer in it's long and glorious history, but there's a fond place in our hearts for that one in particular. A lot of those entries have been lost to the annals of time -- even the contest page itself is gone, save the Internet Archive version.

LED strip dimmer (circa 2019) uses a 555 timer, because what else would you use?

This year is the 50th anniversary of the original design. Back in 1971 [Hans Camenzind] combined 23 transistors, 16 resistors, and 2 diodes, and changed the world forever. Core to the concept of automation is timing, and this chip is a near-universal timing mechanism that was cheap and reliable. Designers can use a 555 along with just a few passive components to configure how its output works. We've heard it said that this is the most sold integrated circuit in the history of the world but have been unable locate a reliable source for the claim. Anecdotally, this thing is everywhere!

Right, We Promised a Contest

The short of it is you just need to use a 555 timer and you qualify for this contest.

The longer story is that we want to see just about anything 555-related. In fact, projects that don't use a 555 are fine as long as they are based on the idea. So, if the global chip shortage has you struggling to even find one of these, just build the parts of the internal circuit yourself and you're golden. The real trick here is to explain what you're doing and why.

Discrete 555 timer by [Robo] still fits the DIP footprintFor instance, this project recreates the 555 in a DIP8 package using surface mount components. It doesn't use a 555, it is a 555!

If you're not up to that kind of crazy soldering, consider joining in on the long-history of abusing the internal circuitry for your own purposes. A recent example that is this circuit-sculpture vibration sensor that repurposes the 555's flip-flop.

But hey, it doesn't have to be world changing. Everyone should get a chance to play around with this chip, so if you've never built a circuit around one, now's the time (har har). Use it like a timer; blink an LED, fading one, or making some sweet sweet music with twenty of them.

Prizes and Recognition

For the top prizes, we want you to wow us, and by us we mean everyone who reads Hackaday. We'll consider all entries and choose three that are creative, clever, and well documented to receive a $150 shopping spree from the Digi-Key warehouse.

But while considering every entry, we'll also have a set of special recognitions in mind. There's something magical about blinking that first LED, so if this is your first rodeo with the 555, say so in your writeup and we may recognize you with the "Hello, world!" award. A couple years ago [Ted Yapo] wrote about building the fastest 555 timer -- these kinds of shenanigans would be recognized with the "Bandwidth Buster" award. Play some funky music and you might grab the "Chiptunes" award. Build something that definitely should not be done on a 555 and you could score the "Shouldn't have used a 555" award. And make it a thing of beauty to be in the running for the "Art for art's sake" award.

These recognitions have no tangible prize value. But just consider the geek cred!

Ladies and Gentlemen, Start Your Timers

You have until January 10th at noon Pacific time to get your entry in. Just start a project page over on Hackaday.io and use the drop-down menu in the left sidebar of your project page to enter it in the 555 Timer Contest. For complete rules, head over to the contest page.

#contests #hackadaycolumns #555 #555timercontest