
Chip
Worship
Eric Schlaepfer has a lifelong
passion for vintage electronics —
especially cathode-ray tubes, which
he has repurposed as functional art
objects such as clocks. He speaks
lyrically about “the joy of a vectored
display, with glowing phosphors.”
But his most widely known project
is a macro-scale 555 chip. “I found
an old datasheet which showed the
components, even including the resistor
values,” he says. “I built a copy from
transistors and resistors, and it worked.”
(The circuit is shown in Figure
F
.)
Eric’s big 555 is a handsome piece,
shown in Figure
G
. Naturally, he
showed it to people — including Lenore
Edman and Windell Oskay, ...