manual control of a victor?

[Jeff Pahl]

Originally Posted by Joe Johnson

Would it be unacceptable to use a 555 in a billion dollar satellite project? Yes, of course.

However, I have used them to test billion dollar satellite projects...

In particular, I needed a PWM stream with two specific pulse widths, and used two 555's as one shots, fired by logic that picked which one based on if I needed a "1" or a "0". The logic was driven by clocked logic that followed all the "golden rules", but the 555 was far and away the easiest way to get the two pulse widths. Took 10 minutes to put it all together, which was far less time than I spent listening to various design engineers tell me I needed a PIC, or a FPGA, or ..... (all of which, in addition to having the added time of writing the software, in the spaceflight test world have the added burden of having to place all of the code used into configuration management, so the <$1 PIC now costs considerably more to use once in a test fixture).

There is almost always more than one solution to any engineering problem. One part of elegant design is picking the one that makes the most sense for a particular design problem, even if that means "breaking" some normally established "rules".