Careers and Hobbies in Electronics Design - Starting With 555 Timer Circuits

Want to learn how to make circuits? As you have probably guessed, there are many tutorials online for getting into circuit analysis and design, but as a novice, you probably have no idea where to start. If you are somewhat up for a challenge, learning how to build 555 timer circuits can be very rewarding and give you a real advantage in your personal projects or in industry. This is because 555 timer circuits are used in a plethora of electronics devices used today (especially digital devices).

The reason you want to start learning 555 timing circuits as soon as possible is because you will learn the majority of the fundamentals of circuit analysis and design all in one circuit, but also because of the incredible utility this specific type of circuit has to offer for many types of implementations. The most famous of the basic 555 timer circuits is the one that allows the blinking of an LED (light emitting diode) at the rate which you specify when you build the circuit. The rate of flashing/blinking is decided by the time constant of your circuit, which is calculated by your resistance times your capacitance.

It may all seem a bit intimidating, but you will have a lot of resources at your disposal revolving around 555 timer circuits, and the internet is a great place to start.

Manufacturers of the IC used in 555 timer circuits, like those of all other electronic elements, provide a datasheet that you can download for free as a published document file. The datasheet offers a tremendous amount of very specific information about the electrical element, but you will need to take a look at good examples of complete 555 timer circuits in order to replicate and understand them fully.

Digital devices incorporate these circuits to provide a serial clock function that times the sequence of bits that comprises the binary code that makes them work the way they were intended. This means that 555 timer circuits are useful for much more than just timing or counting. Hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of electronics used today incorporate these circuits and would not function without them. Now do you see the importance of why you should learn them right away?

You cannot really avoid learning 555 timer circuits if you plan to get into serious electronics design and want to build your own circuits. Their utility is endless, but the amount of electrical engineering experience you get when building them is perhaps more than when building any other type of entry-level circuit. Start by watching a video on YouTube to get an idea of what exactly it is and what it is capable of doing in simple applications.