Digipart is showing me price for PY32F002B with a minimum purchase of 5000 as less that $0.10 (not the factory price, just the cheapest store).
The price for the cheapest NE555 (random manufacturer implementation of a 555) variant in Digipart is $0.13
(Granted, you also need at least a crystal and 2 caps, plus 1 power filtering cap per power line for the microcontroller, but those are all cheap)
It’s ridiculous how modern microcontrollers are so stupidly cheap that even though they can run a lot more digital logic (in the form of software running in them) they almost always beat using older and much simpler digital parts even for something as simple as this.
Even microprocessors are getting stupidly cheap: somebody recently pointed me out the Allwinner F1C100s, which is about the smallest microprocessor that can run Linux, and it costs $2 in bulk to the point that some embedded engineer has made a business card with one running Linux which he just gives away.
555 timer and a transistor or two, I think?
Digipart is showing me price for PY32F002B with a minimum purchase of 5000 as less that $0.10 (not the factory price, just the cheapest store).
The price for the cheapest NE555 (random manufacturer implementation of a 555) variant in Digipart is $0.13
(Granted, you also need at least a crystal and 2 caps, plus 1 power filtering cap per power line for the microcontroller, but those are all cheap)
It’s ridiculous how modern microcontrollers are so stupidly cheap that even though they can run a lot more digital logic (in the form of software running in them) they almost always beat using older and much simpler digital parts even for something as simple as this.
Even microprocessors are getting stupidly cheap: somebody recently pointed me out the Allwinner F1C100s, which is about the smallest microprocessor that can run Linux, and it costs $2 in bulk to the point that some embedded engineer has made a business card with one running Linux which he just gives away.