Graynomad:
people have been saying that for years.
That's true and we're not there yet, but lately there are starting to be practical alternatives.
I'm pretty sure the 555 timer is still being made in DIP version and will be for some time in my opinion. It's my contention that the 555 is probably the IC chip with the longest continuous manufacturing run to date. What maybe going on forty years now?
When a 32-bit chip is the same size and cost as the 8-bit chip and you don't need 5v (increasingly the case) or high current drive on all pins then why use an 8-bitter? Except for the "high current" part all the other things are currently the case, in fact LPCs are always cheaper than a similar AVR, sometimes by a lot.
But 5 volt with pretty high current sink/source capacity is still a very handy 'feature' for a electronic hobbyist and can make the over all size of a project smaller by possibly not requiring extra drive components that a ARM based chip might require?
I'm about to get a board made, it's a dual processor with an LPC1227 and an ATmega1284. These chips are very similar if you look at serial ports, pins, memory etc. But the LPC is half the price, twice the clock speed, probably 3-4x the execution speed, flat address space, no frigging with PROGMEM, FIFOs on the SPI and UARTs etc etc.
So why use the 1284 at all? Basically I want the board to be Arduino compatible and I reckon the 1284 has the best mix of features of all the AVR chips.
I did buy a couple of the TH 1284 blank boards that Bob Makes. I've yet to try and populate one as I'm still playing around with the new Teensey 3.0 ARM board. I guess having lots of choices is the best of all possible states of being. Long live the DIP package.
Lefty
Rob