Heck yes!
While in high school, I made all sorts of intricate circuits using components I purchased from RadioShack.
… and then I was informed about these:
Okay I’m not talking about the 555. The whole purpose.
There is a common principle in engineering:
If you’re not a wheel designer Don’t try to make a new wheel.
Most of the time, it’s expensive in time, is time-consuming, and usually more unstable…
Instead of using cheap, standard and thoroughly tested high-quality components.
In the freshman undergraduate EE class, students worked on the task of designing an 1 KB RAM device using the simplest components. (Clarification This was the concept of the chip using software. It was not built on the bench.) (Clarification #2: copy and paste was highly recommended. It was possible to create the base unit, copy and paste it; then constructed by copying and pasting the previous results could be copied and pasted and repeat until you have 1024 units. This was easy. The problem was connecting it all… If I remember correctly, the solution was to label each pin separately and export it, and then wire them using a computer programmatically generated Text file …)
Oh. My. God.
I’m pretty certain that it was a deliberate act of brutality to teach us the above-mentioned lesson.
I’m sure the last unit said, “Don’t ever do that ever again. Utilize these tools.”