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You Can Have My TIPs When You Pry Them From My Cold, Dead Hands
szczys writes: Should you trash brand new parts developed decades ago and adopt newer models? The argument centers around TIP parts which are a standard type of transistor developed in 1969. This debate started out with a post from Tom Jennings who is known as the creator of Fidonet but works a lot with electronic hardware. Adam Fabio — himself an Electronics Engineer — picked up on the argument for the other side. He attests that if used in the proper application these parts are second to none.
If you're actually concerned about this, rewrite the tutorials rather than complaining about them. A big part of the reason why reach for those parts is because someone taught them how to use them.
I have no doubt that old-school TIP series transistors still have plenty of uses today, but the article is completely devoid of any examples. All it is saying is "look, these things aren't unusably bad for driving motors - they're just bad." Tom's post is still dead-on - using old school NPN BJTs for switching heavy loads today is completely dumb, and just because he exaggerated a bit about just how bad it can get doesn't mean he's wrong.
I was hoping for some insight, like a discussion of robustness (I've blown FETs way more easily than I've blown BJTs), or perhaps use in analog applications, or anything else really. But nope. TFA is literally just confirming the findings that it's trying to disprove, while providing absolutely no counter-examples. Somehow feels like par for the course for Hackaday these days...
I use old school jellybean parts all the time, sometimes because it really doesn't matter (driving a relay? meh, throw a BC547 on it, who cares, it's relatively low power anyway), sometimes because it's all I have lying around, but sometimes using ancient devices is actually very dumb, and I wouldn't turn a motor on and off with a BJT these days.
Where to begin?
Should one even bother to do anything about advice from someone who goes on about enhancement MOSFETs while everything else is rubbish, and then present the circuit symbols for Junction FETs as examples? Makes one wonder what else is inaccurate there.
The actual advice of throwing out anything designed in the past century is at sensitiveresearch.com/DoNotTIP/index.html.
Where not only the so-called TIPs, (by which is meant a certain series of reasonably popular power transistors in TO220 packages, designed by Texas Instruments) but also other devices such as 2N2222, LM386, and "bipolar transistors" and so on, are no longer to be used. Just because they might not be the best choice for switching loads controlled by an Arduino or similar.
This makes for a needless limiting of options -- If all one ever does is to turn things on or off from some microcontroller maybe, but with whatever designs I make I find that to be a small fraction of what is happening. The rest are things like multi-frequency linear or RF where all kinds of semiconductor devices might be applicable. Even vacuum tubes in some cases.
And then looking around the site and discovering the author is in his own words, "reasonably obsessed with the early history of electronic (not necessarily digital) computing" --- and then he advocates discarding what amounts to the elements of the analog electronic computers? This does not ring true.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
Looks like we have a component snob here.
Some people are amazingly derogatory about the "maker community". I wouldn';t exactly class myself as one but I don't get the hate. As far as I can tell, the maker community is about making (duh) *things*. The point being, the final thing is what matters and the process of getting there is "whatever works". This is fine. The emphasis is not on building something using the best tools available, it's about getting to the end goal.
Makers as a result tend to only care about the guts of the circuits and stuff if those affect the final thing. Hence the near obsession with Arduino. It reduces 99% of the work to an already solved problem, even if the solution is in some sense not optimal.
But they're not trying to make the smallest/cheapest object, they're trying to make AN object generally that no one else has.
And you know what? There's nothing wrong with that.
Not sure why the "hobbyist" community holds onto old crud like this when newer things are cheaper and better, win win. Darlingtons are terribly inefficient. It will work fine for turning on a lamp from your arduino but so will 10,000 different FETs.
Who cares? The price probably isn't significant part of the overall cost. $MAKER has a box of darlington pairs, all $MAKER's friends have them and he can probably pick up a replacement in a Maplin on a Sunday if he blows out one away from his normal supply.
Hobbyists oddly enough don't tend to have a trade account with Farnell or want to wait until Tuesday morning (which to them translates to next Saturday) to get the part.
And if the maker in question has a circuit known to work and give enough power, there's no point saving a buck but adding a few hours to a multi-hundred hour project.
Like people using ua741 opamps that are older than me. At least move into 1980 and use an LM358 or something. Same price or cheaper, and the input actually goes to one rail. Still very old junk, but significantly less so.
I say this as someone who refularly uses the sub 3V micropower rail to rail single supply op-amps from TI and Linear (ever seen an 8 pin BGA before?). A 741 is essentially a tank with 8 pins. For low spec stuff the performance is perfectly fine. If you don't need low power, rail to rail operation or high speeds they work and do the job perfectly. They are also infeasibly robust.
For a circuit which only needs a 741, you may as well design it for one. There's lots of pin compatible ones you can swap in at a pinch if you really need. But again it doesn't matter.
741 does the job if the job is not to have the most optimised circuit but instead one that does the job.
I guess people read some circuit from 1975 and figure they need to use the same parts verbatim, buy a bunch and are stuck with them making new circuits, that they then post, and more noobs buy the same old junk!
No the problem is yorr goals and attitudes are different from other people's. You don't understand them so you assume they're idiots. I know a bunch of them and they're not.
If you tried to make some of the stuff they made they'd probably be shaking their heads in week 3 when you've been poring over datasheets and finally sent your circuitboard plans off to be made when they'd have their 4th arduino already bodged inside the laser cut wood case with duct tape and jumper wires with the thing mostly working.
SJW n. One who posts facts.