I don't think a 555 was meant to do 30-60 minute delays...
Microcontrollers are great, not sure about PIC, guess it could be made to work
, just kidding. Kind of depends on what you power supply will be. I use AVR, and they work from 1.8 volts up to 5.5. In real use, a single 1.2 NiMH AA battery to a 6 volt SLA, directly to the chip. You would usually use a 7805 voltage regulator, and a small bypass capacitor. Depending on your input, pull up/down resistors. Some kind of driver for the output.
And of course you'll need a programmer, learn to program the device, maybe learn to program in general...