There's a bit of a meme among electronics hobbyists that for so many projects with an Arduino, somebody in the comments says "I could've done that with a 555”. It's a very common chip with a wide range of uses from arcade sound generation to the timer on a toaster to light/motion activated alarms.
As someone that grew up reading Elektor articles, that pretty much sums up most of the gadgets I see on Maker magazines.
The big difference is that is much easier to program a microcontroller in software, than mastering electronics, specially when analogue circuits are evolved, and the only debugging tools are a multimeter, pen and paper.
I've seen it often on Hackaday over the years, and while they probably could do it all with a 555, I certainly couldn't... My specialties are software and mechanical stuff, for everything in-between I shove in an Arduino and hope it works!
