In this strong form, this is excellent advice for someone who is not me and is not doing what I am doing.
I live in a third-world country where importing chips from abroad is expensive, unreliable, slow, and sometimes dangerous. There are circuits I cannot build because I cannot get the very specialized parts they need. Obviously a linear power supply that can measure how much current it's supplying is not such a circuit, unless you have very stringent precision requirements.
It would be to my benefit to figure out a relatively small set of parts I can buy, ahead of time, in bulk, to cover a wide range of possible circuits. Better still if they're so popular that local distributors have them in stock. An analog comparator probably needs to be in that set. A chip specialized for current measuring probably does not.
If you're designing a product for mass production that needs to be competitive in the market, you can't do it that way. Super-specialized parts will always have better performance, and usually better price/performance than overpowered general-purpose parts. (Also, you need to live in Shenzhen.) But hobbyists have other priorities.
This comment reminds me of a video I saw recently (not sure if I could find it) where someone broke down failure points for projects based on different aspects of engineering, using "designing a drone" as the example project.
For someone working on the systems interactions, the failure point is making sure all the bits of the project are working together.
For someone working on optics, the failure point is finding cost-effective optics -- if you can't do that, then the project isn't going to go forward.
For the hobbyist? The failure point is <i>getting the project done</i>. Every other concern takes a back seat to this!
From my vantage point as someone living in America, however, I'm probably in a similar boat to you, because of my inexperience in electronics. If I want to take a deep dive into the subject, I'd be much better off getting a lot of generic cheap parts I can accidentally burn through, but would give me 90% of what I need, and I can worry about whether or not I need something highly specialized later, as my projects -- and my knowledge and skills! -- mature.
Yeah, that's a good point, and I've actually been terrible at getting projects done recently. Maybe a key question should be how few datasheets you can get by reading?
I live in a third-world country where importing chips from abroad is expensive, unreliable, slow, and sometimes dangerous. There are circuits I cannot build because I cannot get the very specialized parts they need. Obviously a linear power supply that can measure how much current it's supplying is not such a circuit, unless you have very stringent precision requirements.
It would be to my benefit to figure out a relatively small set of parts I can buy, ahead of time, in bulk, to cover a wide range of possible circuits. Better still if they're so popular that local distributors have them in stock. An analog comparator probably needs to be in that set. A chip specialized for current measuring probably does not.
If you're designing a product for mass production that needs to be competitive in the market, you can't do it that way. Super-specialized parts will always have better performance, and usually better price/performance than overpowered general-purpose parts. (Also, you need to live in Shenzhen.) But hobbyists have other priorities.