Thanks, I assumed incorrectly that it was called the 444. It was common in hobby kits and I remembered it had 8 legs. Pretty simple to wire up to a 5V source, potentiometer, a few caps, and an LED to get basic blinking lights.
But what is available today goes way beyond the kits I had when growing up.
I agree, you can do that, but the description was fairly clearly a 555. Besides that an lm444 is a 14 pin dip and a 555 is 8 pins (see comment by yardie).
