As I’m sure many of you already now, today is January 7th. While that might not have any real significance normally, today this means that our favorite hobby supplier, SparkFun, is giving away up to $100,000 of electronic goodness. We know we have our shopping carts filled to the brim, and we’re sure that most of you do too. With the start of Free Day being roughly 10 minutes away, we recommend that everyone man their shopping carts…. This should be interesting…
now time for me to start learning how to make leds blink muhahahah
look like after apache crash after around 50k$ it manage to empty shopping carts so there was no chance after 50k$
I tried valiantly for nearly two hours to no avail. My order was almost complete, but SparkFun’s site just wouldn’t work, and their deal ended.
After looking forward to this for so long, I’m really, really disappointed. I had so many ideas for what I was ordering.
I will associate this miserable failure with SparkFun every time I hear or see their name. I am removing SparkFun from my list of favorite electronics suppliers permanently and will never shop there again.
I had the paypal payment page a few times but every time I clicked submit, it would bring me back to the page that has a checkout confirmation, which means that an error occurred every time.
That’s sort of stupid…
Grr… I started an hour and forty-five minutes before it actually started, and I still got stuck at the shipping page, where some people say they started trying at 70-80k, and they got it. That’s borderline unfair.
I had a cart ready worth $160 and I was already logged in, yet I was unable to get to my cart ONCE to buy the stuff.
Damn it to hell…
About my last post: Sorry, I forgot to mention that the 11:30 was Eastern time. I was briefly able to get to their site, but it crashed as soon as I tried to get to my shopping cart.
Sparkfun rules, you guys are just hatin’ because you didn’t get lucky. It is a little annoying HAD made this post, but at least you have a place to bitch about it :)
A couple of posts said Comcast connections were blocked or needed re-routing. Does anyone know why Comcast users were hindered? I had my cart all set up last night and was up and ready to go today and still didn’t make it (and I’m on a Comcast connection).
@ moo
haha love the comment to get the people racked up even more! however if you are a noob GO AWAY AND LET US SULK!!!!!
3 days ago i filld my cart i logged in 1 hour before it started i click checkout after 30 min it downloads a 0k php file so my point is wtf
and spark fun just lost my busness
@telloc, heck yeah it’s annoying HAD made this post, I finally got to the shipping page with only 10k left in the free-budget after almost three hours of work to get just there. If HAD hadn’t made this post, I wonder if I’d have gotten it?
I was trying to check out since the second it started. In the past I have tried to support SparkFun despite there less than cheap prices.
Now it will be 100% ebay, digi-key and elsewhere.
Their promotion backfired at least for me.
Sure they didn’t have to give away anything but when you are denies because their server melted it just pisses people off.
had the sticky note reminding me of free day on my monitor since December 7th, an alarm set for 10:55(EST) had my shopping cart loaded since yesterday morning (just wanted a gps module, only $60, wasn’t being greedy). Shipping addresses and funding sources were checked and ready to go. Was poised and ready at exactly 11:00:01(EST), did not leave my computer at all for the last 2 hours, got through every step even paypal confirmation, but no dice. Luck just was not with me today: every time I hit the submit button it would time out then take me back to the order confirmation page.
Congrats to all you lucky few
whose orders finally went through.
@Scott
This wasn’t supposed to be a contest or lottery. They wasted people’s time because of their crappy site. I think they have about 1,000 happy customers right now and 100 times that many upset would-be customers.
A big fat thanks to all the tech blogs like this one who thought it’d be a great idea to announce this right before the event took place. It was supposed to be a thank you for past customers, not for a bunch of new people to go poking around just to see what they could get for free from a place they’ve probably never even heard of.
But hey, what’s that matter when you can put up a story that’s likely to attract a few more hits to your blog that day?
At least I know what news feeds I’m dropping.
15 tabs open, all autoreloading. finally got through after 1 and a half hours of trying atthe checkout screen. got my arduino mega free~ plus an ARM dev board
@Hackineer
Agreed
Had $250 in my cart, would have bought it all if I could have got $100 off. Now I’ll just wait and buy it all on eBay.
Way to drop the ball and let all the newcomers get the good Sparkfun.
So, when does the free day start? at 10 PST?
I have to say you’re all pussies. It is a contest, it is a DDOS contest. You got in based on a machine’s idea of fairness and how TCP and SSL work together on their single webserver. Get over it. It was fun, I tried the entire time, I lost.
Stop being a goddamn pussy, it was a promotion you played or didn’t. For Sparkfun it was still successful at least 1000 users got their orders in.
You were played because you wanted something free.
@jerm1386
Exactly the same situation.
complete waste of 2 hours unfortunately – should have just ordered normally and coughed up the money!
The contest is over, I did not make it after spending hours in the checkout_payment.php page. Still the website is lagged
Comcast is know as a source of zombie machines ot most Internet pros, so having connections from Comcast and Time warner when it looks like a giant DDOS attack is typical for firewalls or smart routers that try and deal with such problems. I got around it by using a UNI connection on the other side of the country.
When you share your internet connection with millions of brainless twits that have their computers infected with trojans and bots, you suffer when a big event that looks like a DDOS happens.
Oh the 15 tabs idiots, gee did you watch the packets go through? Did you see 15 seperate TCP connection attempt to be made? No you didn’t because you didn’t bother to look. You made 1 TCP request with hopes to pipeline all the other requests. Your 15 tabs didn’t mean squat.
You effectively had 1 tab and a bunch of other tabs waiting to ruin whatever connection you could muster
RAWR. had a shopping cart ready at 11:20. couldnt get to the shopping cart though -_-. lamez0r.
gah, the refresh=1 trick would have worked. oh well, getting lunch was probably more worth while
Shame. Had my order all ready too, but I haven’t been able to access the site since about 8:00 (Colorado time), and still can’t get through…
…oh wait, there we go.
Still, nice idea SparkFun.
@No a pussy:
Seriously. I’ve never seen so much whining over not getting a free ride. It’s not like they owed us an arduino.
Sucks, I didn’t get it. I got as far as credit card checking. When it finally finished loading, it was after the 100k was gone and it went back to the billing page :(.
I’ll be interested in seeing some of the server statistics, I hope they post them.
Very generous of SparkFun. Performance was disappointing.
“Comcast is know as a source of zombie machines ot most Internet pros, so having connections from Comcast and Time warner when it looks like a giant DDOS attack is typical for firewalls or smart routers that try and deal with such problems. I got around it by using a UNI connection on the other side of the country.”
@ farthead-
I wish I knew that. I’ve been waiting for this for weeks, only to have it (probably) ruined by the ISP I use. Oh well. Time for breakfast (or lunch, at this point).
IMHO, the free stuff should only have been available to those who have *either* purchased something from them or had an account for at least a month. I bet most of the people who have gotten the free stuff made accounts yesterday and have never ordered anything before.
Alas, I would’ve liked to have something to tinker with, but at $60 for the Arduino Starter Kit I simply can’t afford it.
damn im soo sleepy….its now 2am
i have comcast i got my order trew its all about luck and how quick u can f5
Kudos to Sparkfun for the gesture. Even if they had perfect server capacity, it would have been over in a few minutes with the same result – not everyone would have gotten their free stuff. And those of you who had multiple machines and multiple tabs running all rapidly hitting their system – you do realize you only compounded the problem, right?
was just fun seeing this…
A prime example in “Human Behavior” all this whining…
I bet if they found some way to host this at Amazon or Google for the day, they’d have sold out in twenty minutes or less, but at least that way, people could have actually had a *chance* with pages loading.
Im gonna bomb the SF bldg tonight
Oh well, I’ll place my order anyway. I wouldn’t mind having some LED bars. It was fun while it lasted!
To everyone bitching about not getting something,
Sparkfun is a big(ish) website. They advertised this event, and it got around the internet quite quickly.
Only 1000 people would have got stuff anyway, and THE ENTIRE INTERNETS were hammering their server.
You played, you lost. Its not because sparkfun has bad servers or bad customer service, its because theres so many of us.
Anyone refusing to give business to sparkfun now because of this is stupid at best. Don’t give them business because their prices are high, or their products are inferior, or something like that, if that’s what you think. Not giving them business because their tubes werent wide enough to handle every turd on the internet at the same time… *sigh*
what is this shit I tried during 1hour to see the get the final checkout page avter paypal express checkout… during that our everything was down and only 10% of the 100k were given, and the 90% of the rest went of in 40min right after i had to leave to job….
bitten in the ass by my own greed ;)
had something in my cart 1 month ago and decided to be cheap and wait for free day. now i’ll pay full price anyway, but at the cost of a 1 month shipping delay and 2 hours of hitting refresh.
the really funny part though is that i could have paid off my purchase just by spending those 2 hours doing billable work haha
the moral? shut up and get back to work :)
@mgrusin – Yeah well thats the human way. When it comes down to it, it’s all about ones self.
why does everyone asume only 1000 people got something im beting its more like 1500 to 1900.
I understand they just upgraded their servers, but this is EXACTLY the reason why they shouldn’t have run this promotion. At least, not so soon. I’m no programmer or web designer by any stretch, but I have to think their is some sort of way to load test a system, get to know the limits. Maybe purchase temporary additional bandwidth? I guess I’m not sure how it works but I’m sure they knew from previous articles/posts/comments across the web that this would be big, and they would need to be extra sure they could handle it. I could totally understand if I got to the page and the orders poured in so fast that I missed out. But I think the beef is that a lot of us (including me) just couldn’t get the site to come up in the first place.
I was hoping to become a sparkfun customer as it seems they have a lot of cool stuff, and the hacking community here seems to rave about them. I was planning to purchase more than the $100 credit. Alas there are plenty of sites with similar product selections and pricing. Guess I’ll just stick to what I know.
Truly though, I mean this, congrats to those who got stuff! Really I hope to see a flood of awesome projects. Once in a while I still find inspiration here.
I got my free stuff.
Thanks hack-a-day.
I’m gonna go sell this BlueSmurf thing on eBay. I hope 2 BlueSmurfs work together cause I didn’t see any BlueSmurfettes.
Any you sore losers stop whining, go on over to e-bay next week and buy some stuff discounted.
I feel digitally violated.
I feel like a victim.
A victim of control.
I was used.
—–
On January the 7th, 2010, at 10:44 AM, let it be known that I-
-I was “SparkRoll’d”.
I almost got through but I could not check out this was crazy all I wanted was a few stepper drivers and AVR chips.
Next time they should do this differently maybe have it where you get something free if you spend $50 or a randomly selected order can be free.