Posted by userbinator 3 days ago
Unfortunately, those days seem to be gone. Now any time I see someone point out "you could just use a 555 for that", people are replying "I just threw an PIC/AVR/STM32/RPi in there instead...software is so much better than having to do math to calculate those R and C values".
They were always more flexible, are usually more accurate, and are often easier to engineer. With the price point now being roughly the same, it makes zero business sense to go for a 555.
"You could've used a 555" is becoming the new "you could've used a punch card"/"you could've used a vacuum tube": true, but would that make it better?
One of the more famous toys using it (in blob form) is the Executor/Echo Keyller keychain: https://youtu.be/20W6AJuMjEk
Just last week I had to open first time alarm clock with green 7-segment display. Because I accidentally dropped it while vacuuming and antenna cord broke as it was so firmly under picture frame holding nail. And while open cleaned interior from dust, used greasy PRF to lubricate pots, switches and tuning wheel. If I recall correctly it did have that LM8560 chip in int and with display looked almost exactly what was in subject article inside.
Label on bottom claims: -----------------------------
Luxor CR 9016
NOKIA Consumer Electronics
International S.A
(FI)(N)(S)[x] 230V ~ 50Hz
Battery 9 V
MADE FOR NOKIA IN CHINA
-----------------------------
SERIAL NO.
9302-00106
Q: But why the device is branded Luxor and it's made for NOKIA? A: Because NOKIA bought bit earlier that year (1985) Swedish Luxor consumer electronics. And I guess they did not had yet time redo chassis with NOKIA printed on and this was a still products transition period.
NOKIA was still at that time making also TV sets and was about to bring two years later its first completely new way of implementing analog TV using digital processing chips, which allowed quite nice fieatures like PIP which was great help making VHS recording without ads. I had one of those TV-sets (M-model) and used it about 10 years.
But that alarmclock radio from -85 is still going strong, good shape and it definitely was good purchase about 40 years ago.
e: Sorry about formatting, I tried to find how to format literally, but couldn't find. OK, good enough now.
I find that in my own writing I no longer strive for perfect grammar and polish since nowadays it actually cheapens the end result, everybody has perfect grammar today.
(Update: of course I had to ask my friendly neighborhood LLM, and the answer is the correct usages still dominate incorrect ones, so statistics favor correctness. They down-weight low quality sources (comments like mine) and up-weight high quality ones (published books, reputable news sites). Then human reinforcement learning adds further polish.)
This is why LLMs can still channel typos or non/standard writing when you ask them to write in such a style for example.
If they weren’t improvised, they’d be factory explosives devices (FEDs) after all?
The mechanism was surprisingly simple once I got it opened and saw how it worked but from the outside made no sense, I probably stared at that clock for an hour trying to figure out how it worked before I finally opened it up to see what was inside. I might still have the clock mechanism in a box out in the garage.
Edit: I suspect these clocks were actually from the time period at the end of flip-flops, showed up too late to become common, LEDs/LCDs killed them. The digits were on the dim side, perfectly fine for a bedside alarm clock and quite good for that situation but you had to be fairly close to clock to read it in a well lit room. Better than a flip-flop in a dark room but worse than an LCD in the light.
as mentioned on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH6LzV8FaEw and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_fluorescent_display
Might have to go dig into that box in the garage and see if I still have it. I had intended on making a stand alone clock from it; the radio is not very good and the case has seen better days, so I was going to make a case for just the clock mechanism, perhaps its time.
There's also nixie and numitron tubes, as well as some neon digit displays. If it wasn't a tube, maybe it was a nixie-like display with a stack of acrylic plates each illuminated by an individual bulb.
On the other hand, the only saving grace about my bright green and blue LED router is that someone whose hand should be shaken thought to allow software disabling or even a scheduled disabling of the LEDs.
The interesting thing is that both countries are part of the Continental Europe Synchronous Area, so they are by definition running on the same frequency.
There must be a different explanation for the change in accuracy, but I wonder what?