July 11th, 2006 in Projects.
To find something to do with my handy-dandy logic probe, I threw together a very simple square-wave oscillator using a 555 timer and some simple components I had lying around. You can only see so many square waves before you get bored, so I decided to see how fast I could make a 555 go. You never really see them used as oscillators in RF circuits, which I always guesses was because they didn’t go fast enough. Anywho, I had much-less-than-ideal resistors and capacitors for this (the smaller, the faster, and the components I had were quite large) but with some tweaking I got the chip to oscillate reliably at 675.68 kHz. That’s pretty good if you ask me. Eventually I prodded hard and it went faster, but my probe began aliasing at that point, so I couldn’t get accurate readings as to how fast it was going anymore.
Reality check: yes, this is what I do when I get home from work and before bed…