Instead of going with a microcontroller he built the circuit around a 555 timer. What he really needed in this case is a flip-flop but lacking a chip for that he went with the 555 because it has ...

His initial design for the flip flop that would form the core of the circuit had a pair of 555s surrounded with a bunch of OR gates and inverters — within the rules of the contest but hardly in ...

Figure 4 and 5 represent the transistor level schematic that show how a typical asynchronous RESET type flip-flop can be converted into the proposed circuit which can function as either RESET or SET ...