“When you need pulses of any sort, long, short and with variable frequency you can use one or two 555 timers. That works, is easy to set up and is cheap. But it also limited to a certain range in frequency and pulse length.
If you want a precise pulse length you will need an oscilloscope to check it. The same goes for when you want an exact frequency.
I needed pulses of exactly 1us, 5us, 1ms and 5ms, I decided that trying to do that with 555 timers was not what I wanted.
So I build a versatile pulse generator with a microcontroller and a crystal to produce exact results and a display to show the current values for frequency and pulse length.
Supplies:
STM8S103F3 on development board
16 MHz crystal
ST7735 1.8 inch TFT display
74HC14
rotary encoder (with button)
projectbox
perfboard
STMicroelectronics ST-Visual_Develop (IDE)
Cosmic Software STM8 compiler
ST-Link-V2 (or a clone)
manuals about the STM8S103
coffee”