Who is your favourite electronics guru?

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Nope.  What you don\'t seem to notice is that you can skin a whole
lot of cats with a 555 without having to climb the learning curve of
a cheap µC if that\'s what you\'re trying to make reference to.

BTW, you don\'t have much familiarity with microcontrollers either,
do you?

"John Fields" schreef in bericht news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

A while ago you said you guys had the largest dicks.

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Thanks, Frank.
(remove \'q\' and \'.invalid\' when replying by email)

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So you\'ve been out of the game for what... 20 years?

Come on, not even _one_ application?

Nothing where you could use a window comparator with a [pretty]
isothermal ratiometric voltage divider on its front end?

Nothing where you could drive a relay without having to use a
comparator and an outboard transistor?

Nothing where you could implement a simple one-shot with a couple of
caps and a resistor or an astable with the same parts count?

Too bad your first encounter blinded you to what _was_ possible.

snip

I use the 666 now,overpowering bit of stuff

martin

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He\'s what?

Nah, that beast runs way too hot.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

The sequential phase detectors are interesting - I'd been interested in phase detectors (for box-car integrators) for some time when I first ran into the MC4044, and the sequential phase detector it incorporated (Phase Frequency detector #1) was new to me.

The second edition of Floyd Gardner's "Phaselock Techniques" cites Motorola's "Phase-Locked Loop Data Book" 2nd edition August 1973, and D.K. Morgan and G.Steudel in "The RCA COS/MOS Phse-Locked Loop" application note ICAN-6101 of October 1972 as the sources for the sequential phase-frequency detector he shows in figure 6-18.

The circuit is essentially the same as that shown in the MC4044 data sheet - albeit a bit easier to follow - which presumably had been around since Jim designed the circuit in the mid-1960's.

The phase detector looks patentable, so one has to wonder why Motorola neither patented it, nor converted it to CMOS at the same time that RCA did.

Jim should be able to give us a little insight into what was going on behind the scenes there ....

When I looked at the MC4044 datasheet just now I was reminded how astonishingly good the application section of that datasheet had been. I remember thinking at the time that it must have been pirated from Floyd M. Gardner's first edition, but that was only published in 1966.

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Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I made a PWM motor controller using one only about five years ago, and, of course, since it was for a spool gun for a portable MIG welder, it died first time out.

So I did an astable with some HV transistors and stuff, and it worked OK. Unfortunately, the product died on the vine. )-;

Thanks, Rich

As it turns out - no. The string of three 5k diffused resistors is one of the less attractive features of the device.

Rarely had to drive a relay - we tended to design them out when we could.

We mostly designed out the one-shots as well, and the ones that I did use tended to be a little quicker than the 555 could manage - there is a paper in the Journal of Scientific Instruments - Ghiggino, K.P., Phillips, D., and Sloman, A.W. "Nanosecond pulse stretcher" Journal of Physics E: Scientific Instruments, 12, 686-687 (1979) which describes a discrete transistor monstable that stretches a 2nsec pulse out to

10nsec to make it detectable by an AM685 comparator - I should have used an emitter-coupled monostable, but unfortunately the prototype worked fine in the application, so there was no motivation to improve it

More made it clear to me what was impossible.

Farnell still lists a page of them, but it has to be a legacy market.

If you are still using the 555, I suppose you are also still using

22V10's, and cutting up your food with knives you knap out of lumps of flint.

I'm proposing that there aren't that many applications where a circuit designer who knows modern integrated circuits is going to end up with a

555-shaped space.

That's the wrong question.

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Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

The last time I designed anything using a 22CV10 was about 4 months ago. We're paying...hmm... $1.38 each for them.

John

Have one such report to share?

I'd still look at your server logs, too. Sometimes I wonder if we can trust those that show us themsleves how well they are delivering!

If you can't sell yourself, you can't sell anything else. if you lack those skills, you are pretty much useless. Before I became disabled, I rarely had to put in more than one application before I got a good job. People can tell the difference between experience and bluster.

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Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I\'ve got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

[...]

Not me mate!. I don't do GHz, FPGA, PLL, photodiodes, sophistication, precision. I do do, mundane, workaday, fast turnaround, cost sensitive, quantity. Someones got to do it and I know of far worse ways of earning a crust.

WRT the OP. There's 5 posters here I really have lots of time for but the one who would get my final vote is Phil Hobbs. He writes lucidly on some truly weird science, without an edge, or agenda for personal gain. john

They already pay some lunatic to screw up the submissions. Sent in a simple idea with a paragraph of text, a formula and a good drawing. Turned up as a junker accompanied by reams of gobbledygook. Worst thing was the "$100", turned out to be a gift voucher. (illegal in UK) john

Sure, this happens all the time.

Now this is not true. Ask any magazine editor and you will find that IFDs are the #1 rated section in all their reader polls. Editors are desperate to get them, and when they don't get good ones, they have to publish bad ones.

Example please? Since he shows the scope photos (and often the breadboard photos), it's hard to believe that they don't work as described.

Widlar's LM301 (LM101) was on the market before Dave Fullagar designed the uA741. Widlar was perfectly capable of designing an internally compensated part, he just didn't believe in it.

The LM307 is just an LM301 with a 30pF cap added, and as you say came out after the 741 was well established. Did Widlar actually add the cap? I always thought someone else hacked that in.

Maybe "horrible" is a little bit of an exaggeration?

What do you see as the problems with the 741 output stage?

That 30pF cap occupies quite an area of silicon, and I never had a problem finding space for it on the boards I was working on.

Beats me.

The lateral PNP had a current gain of about three, so a heavy negative load on a 741 or a 748 really upped the current drawn by the op amp.

We did find that if you sank something approaching the maximum persmissible current into the 748 output anywhere near -10V the output stage could go into oscillation, which lead to a swift replacement by an LM301. We never saw this problem with the 741, but the 748 problem did make us nervous about both parts.

At the time they were marginally cheaper than the LM301, but not so much cheaper that we were under any pressure to use them.

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Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Not true. 

On these newsgroups, for instance, a 555 is often the device of
choice because of the ease of use of the device, its low cost, and
its universal obtainability.