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Comment by firewolf34 | Hacker News Reader

The article says he wanted the gates to be configurable. But yeah, seems like a missed opportunity to not familiarize with the 74 series. That having been said, the AVR chips are probably a lot more useful to learn as a newbie these days. Not many people using discrete logic ICs anymore :(

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That having been said, the AVR chips are probably a lot more useful to learn as a newbie these days. Not many people using discrete logic ICs anymore

I dunno. I mean, there's no question that they are less widely than in their heyday. But I think there might be a surprising number of uses where they are used for some small (very small) bit of functionality where even the smallest microcontroller is overkill.

In my own experience, I had something recently where I literally needed a single AND gate to switch a transistor on or off based on whether one or both of two power rails were HIGH. A discrete 74xx chip turned out to be the simplest way to implement that.

I'd say that pretty much every schematic I've reviewed in the last few years has a handful of logic on it. Often we need to guarantee that something is off or disconnected if the CPU fails or software crashed, etc. Hard-wired logic is good for that kind of thing.

Ti have long had "little logic" for this kind of thing (I've been out of that game for a while, maybe something has taken its place?)

2018 link (PDF): https://www.ti.com/lit/pdf/scyt129

Hey, thanks, I did not know about the "little logic" stuff until just now. I'd always looked at the 7400 series chips (or 4000 series chips) as my "goto's" for one-off individual logic gate kind of stuff.

s/widely than/widely used than/

How the heck did I just leave an entire word out? sigh

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