Amazon can lead a person to strange places. Today it lead me to "Gump's grocery", an entirely plausible name for an electronics vendor in the middle kingdom's Shenzhen city.
It lead me there because they were selling the 556 chips for about half the price of any other vendor on Amazon.
My expectations were low, but I was still disappointed.
When the chips arrived, I found that they had simply been shoved into an antistatic ziplock bag without any sort of protection for the pins. As a result, at least half the pins on all the chips were bent. This is not ideal. I didn't take a picture of them in that sorry state because I was a bit frustrated, and instead went straight to unbending all the pins.
Thankfully I was able to straighten them out without any of them breaking off, so that's good.
(I just set them on the breadboard like this for temporary storage, and also to make sure the pins were lined up.)
Now you might notice in the above picture that there are only 9 556 ICs present. Thankfully I did receive 10, the other one is sitting in circuit right now, doing its wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey thing.
I've also officially run out of space on this breadboard, but that's a worry for another time.
Upon installing the first chip, wiring it up, and powering on the controller, I found to my dismay that it was performing in unexpected and erratic ways. Then I remembered that I had the code set up for an active-low signal and the circuit was providing an active-high one now, and after fixing that things worked perfectly.
I even went through and tested all 10 chips in the same circuit (thank goodness for breadboards) and they all somehow passed with flying colors.
Despite very obviously being salvaged from e-waste.
Ah well, I suppose it's environmentally friendly to buy back our trash on Amazon after shipping it over there in the first place for 'disposal'.
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