Most popular hobby electronic parts
partsbox.com
partsbox.com
Most DYI enthusiasts post a build. This includes usually a detailed parts list to a variety of sources.
Overtime this list ages and that can be quite fast. Parts go out of stock, deprecate, or are no longer sold by the particular vendors / URL posted.
I would love to see a platform that helps source and maintain those lists with the community. It could be an aggregate multivender list with a preference to your sources but allows a centralized purchase for the DYI kit. Perhaps there could be a small premium to help sustain the platform.
Utilizing the above idea they're also could be a co-op concept. This allows the community to buy parts/manufacture in bulk. Allowing x amount of people to sign up for x number of kits providing a nice price to all involved.
I figured that with so many people using it, I might as well count how popular electronic components are, and took some time to generate a ranking of most popular parts and write it up.
a) That does not equate to "parts most popularly used" in those hobbyists' projects. One may well have a stack of 7805s in one's inventory, and then go for a low-drop or switching alternative in a project. Or put a uC in nearly any project, but have 20 different types of those.
b) As anyone who's ever been to a meeting of electronics enthousiasts, radio amateurs, hackerspace etc knows: parts inventories age. In some collections a good % of parts is decades old.
Many parts are just to have something on hand when one feels like experimenting / designing something. But 1st experiments & published designs can be like baby strollers vs. SUVs.
Besides: nothing wrong with many of the 'ancients'. 1N4148 has good specs for a small-signal diode. The 555 is, and will remain a classic. Exact specs of an opamp don't matter much in many circuits, as long as it's "good enough". Etc etc.
I guess more precise definitions of "popular" could be constructed, but that's the simplest one and I went with it, especially as it isn't particularly invasive or creepy (we're just counting how many people have a certain linked part in their database, think of it as a counter per linked part that gets incremented if somebody adds a part and decremented if they delete the part).