AWESOME! FREE STUFF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I hope no one tries to bring down there shiny new servers with a DOS attack before it starts…

Hasn’t anyone noticed this is right on the heels of that mess about BlueSMiRF?

@Cheerful Phil,
That’s the kind of nonconstructive activity that makes these give-aways useless. Get items YOU plan using. To try to make a buck here makes no sense. If SparkFun really has nothing you want/need on their site, why do you even visit this website?

blue laser because it is america and I can. Maybe I’m donating the money to feed starving gay baby whales to Ethiopians. Maybe I’m buying another furby just to do it. Maybe I’ll have a contest to see who can guess what’s in the box that I bought with the box from sparkfun that probably just contains a record player spooling off cassette tape to trail out of my car window or a crossbow that shoots alligators with a flashlight tied to it lol. Whoever guesses what it is wins all of the money i made on that box. I guess I will need two sparkfun boxes then. One for the contest and one for myself for operating costs of said contest. I should try for more is the moral of the story?

Oh, and I guessed the moral of your story too!
..
The only thing you can count on more than people trying to do something nice once in a while is some asshat trying to take advantage of the system.

i really would like to have this nes-controller in the back…

I’d love to be able to get an arduino and some stepper motors through this scheme… call me a cynic, but I reckon its likely that most of the 1000 successful orders will be on ebay minutes after the offer opens.

Opening 9am MST… I’ll be sure to be camping the sparkfun checkout button at 4pm GMT on the 7th January, along with a million others, no doubt :)

wow this would be sweet, i would like to start using AVRs in my projects, and i have one waiting on the backburner because of lack of funds (poor college kid stereotype). id love to be able to get a AVR getup, programmer and LCD.

For me it’d be going on sale at: Friday, January 8, 2010 at 5:00:00 AM
The morning of a friends wedding that im groomsmaning at. I might get up and try my luck (cos i’m so cheap)

So, honestly, how long will it take to sell out? 15 minutes? 5 minutes? 30 seconds? I dunno, I’m gonna be camped out, but it’s definitely gonna be a huge rush. What I wonder is, how badly are people going to abuse this? For example, I hope people aren’t going to get a couple things they really want and then spend the rest cleaning Sparkfun out of AVRs they don’t need. I know all I really want is an Arduino and a an AVR USB programmer (I’m tired of using a parallel port cable), and it might be nice to grab a couple of nifty buttons/thingamabobs to play with. It’s really generous of Sparkfun to reach out to those of us with shallower pockets.

@cheerful phil
PS You suck. Damn trolls…

Johnholio ya really can’t afford a resistor? Surely there are tons of them around the uni lab dumpsters. I have found old VCRs to be a wonderful repository of resistors, diodes, transistors, etc. Surely someone on craigslist free is getting rid of that or an old TV. There is always the “Pencil lead” trick where you draw lines of different thicknesses on paper and make your own in varying degrees that I would be sure they would teach you in EE school or even you might have heard of it in computer school when people talk about overclocking older AMDs hehe. Also many household vegetables and plants can be used not only as resistors but some have very unique capacitance properties. I’m not saying hook an arduino to a group of ferns and sit back and watch your new pong game, but being a broke student made (and makes me still) poke around and re-beat the life into something until I find something that works better. Ya can try to beat the pikeys to things left on people’s stoops but who are we kidding those guys are fast lol! Anyhoo best of luck in your numerous endeavors.

whats to stop you from buying a $100 giftcard?

@hawkeye

That they say in the original article that you can’t.

Hello!
And that day is nearby. We have until Thursday to decide what we want.

And naturally I believe I’ll select a pair of LCD graphic displays (not character based, one uses an SPI format (or method) and one has its own breakout board. The SPI one has a helper board of its own…

To quote someone reasonably well known in SCIFI circles, “Not bloody likely.”.

Sparkfun is closed. we killed it.

“SparkFun Electronics is Temporarily Closed!”

Looks like we killed it. Damn, guess i won’t be getting any free stuff.

… and i’ll get my geekstaff from somewhere else.

Not surprised their web server croaked. I can’t even ping it now.

R.I.P. SparkFun web server.

I wonder who will end up getting their order through.

1) he who is lucky
2) he who is persistent enough to wait until everyone else gives up
3) he who is as clever as to script the ordering process

Any bets?

IMHO, those that didn’t have their cart waiting at the submit order button can better stop trying. It’s dead.

I got as far as a page saying ‘order confirmed’ in the title, but the page itself was empty. We’ll have to see tomorrow if my Christmas stocking has been filled :-)

Damn, that was fast… Site is now at $97.541. Maybe next time :-(

guy: That’s weird. It says $17k now.

I keep trying to update my cart to get 3 boards instead of just 1, and it keeps not working and I give up and just reload the shopping-cart page, which occasionally works.

And now they’re back to the “SparkFun Electronics is Temporarily Closed!” page.

Update:

“Sparkfun free day has concluded! $100,000.00 was given away in: 1h : 44m : 50s”

I got far enough to get to the “register as a new user” page, where I saw that. Sigh.