Just a note Kai, your suggestion of 1N4004 diodes won't work too well at the higher frequencies - as to your exact app, I'm not suitably motivated at this time of night to calc the freq of the 555! The venerable old 1N4148 may be a choice here.

As for fathers using 555's, the 555 came out in my generation! My father would have thought himself lucky to be using silicon transistors!


Whilst there was mention of the NatSemi 'simple switchers', buck and boost converters can be fashioned fairly simply by using our friend the 555 and a transistor with the usual inductor & schottky diode. don't expect regulation! But if you need a bit more current or voltage than a charge pump, these may be a choice. The old MC34063 or 78S40 chip is a cheapy if you need regulation - hard to beat the parts count of a simple switcher though.

The variety of voltages for fluorescent displays are normally generated by a tiny transformer with a transistor and a handful of components as a self oscillating converter. No ics involved here. But for me, the allure of the little black boxes is too overwhelming - pick the right black box, put it in the circuit - job done. Maybe I'm just getting lazy!