5 ms·
somewhere else they were discussing how to use a 555 to time 55 years, and how for such a long period you'd need impractical resistance and capacitance values.
by mishellaneous 5mo ago
somewhere else they were discussing how to use a 555 to time 55 years, and how for such a long period you'd need impractical resistance and capacitance values.
easy workaround would be to set a more reasonable period, say, 1 sec, and use a counter to know when you hit 55 years.
coincidentally, 55 years is 2 ** 30.7 seconds, so it'd just fit in a 32 bit register.
though i take you were thinking about counting clock cycles or something in which case surely your register would overflow
- brucehoult 4mo agoThe size of a register is not the largest value you can conveniently count on a computer. You can use multiple registers. Old computers often had a "carry flag" specifically to make this easier e.g.on Arm: add r0,r0,#1 adc r1,r1,#0 But even on RISC-V, often criticised for not having a carry flag, it's not hard: addi a0,a0,1 sltiu t1,a0,1 # set to 1 if a0 wrapped back to 0 add a1,a1,t1