"Alan B. Pearce" writes:
>Its price is about half that of the nearest 8 pin pic, and because it comes
>in a 6 pin SOT-23 package it can take up minimal room (at a guess something
>like a third to half that of an SO-8). For the price it is possible to have
>an item with higher functionality than a 555, in a smaller space, and for a
>lesser price.

	Thank you and thanks to Marcel Duchamp.  I have been using
NE555's in various projects for about 30 years, now.  I am surprised,
but that chip is still around and is quite useful along with it's big
brother, the NE556 when you need two 555's.
The one exasperating thing I always noticed about the NE555's all the
way back to my first projects with them in 1973 or 1974 or so was that
it always seemed like the polarities of the output and or trigger and
reset pins were opposite of what one needed for a given job and you
had to use transistors or inverters to get the desired outcome,
meaning more parts.  PIC's solve this problem because one can just
program the I/O pins to respond to the outside world in whatever way
best fits the rest of the project.

	Approximately what do the 8-pin 10F206's cost in ones and twos?
I know the 12C509's in the JW packages cost about $9.00 a piece.  The
10F206 packages don't need the JW case and don't have the A/D module
nor interrupts like the 12F675/629's
so they should be cheaper even in the 8-pin DIP package.
>OK it does have the 12 bit core limitations of the 12C509 series, but
>shucks, you cannot have everything - this just pretty close.

	Sometimes, that is all you need.  The only other neat thing
about the NE555 is that it runs on anything from 5 volts up to 15
volts and will source lots of current for brief periods of time.  I
even sourced drive for a #47 pilot lamp off of one NE555 which
normally pulls about 200 MA.  I certainly wouldn't recommend this as
my finger print just about baked to the top of the NE555 after running
it that way for only a few seconds.  The circuit was a 25-HZ tone
generator with the bulb flickering at that rate.  A little solar cell
next to it produced the signal with the bulb's filament acting as a
low-pass filter.  That was back in 1975 or so.  I think I got smart
and used a transistor fed off of the 555 to switch the lamp so the
chip wouldn't self-destruct.  Amazing what we try when we are young
and foolish.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group
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