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…
I’m sure that f5 keys everywhere are sore after this incident.
@Zach Kurth which loyal customers? You’re obviously not one of them.
!c
I thought I would post a few SparkFun alternatives besides the obvious ones like Digi-Key and eBay.
These are just the ones that I can think of right now. I’m sure there are many more. Please post suggestions I’ve missed.
I had trouble posting the list of sites here, so I had to Krunch the list.
krunchd dot com slash hacker_toys
I’m going to visit sparkfun just to see what you folks are all talking about. Maybe I’ll even buy something there.
If part of all this ho0haw was just a loadtest — I’m even more interested. I used to be in the business of web site loadtesting. But I’m pretty sure I can do a commerce site load test, complete with customer simulations, credit card transactions, and paypal access, for a lot cheaper that $100k.
I waited pase 5 hours after i usually go to sleep to try to get something. I finally get to the site just to see that the give away ended. Crap, I picked out $100.00 flat worth of parts.
@j9
I think it was more a publicity stunt than a load test.
I wonder what would happen if it was put up here and other places that a website that just so happened to be on the same server as something important was giving away free crap could we DDOS them too? :D that would be a fun experiment
eVEN THOUGH i DIDN’T GET ANY FREEBIES I WOULD STILL LIKE TO THANK SPARKFUN FOR DOING A REALLY NICE THING FOR IT’S CUSTOMERS, AND FOR THE INSANE ~1.6 HOUR LONG ADRENALINE RUSH I GOT FROM SITTING GLUED TO MY SCREEN TRYING EVERY LITTLE TRICK I COULD THINK OF TO GET IN. I TRULY GOT A GOOD “RUN” FOR MY MONEY TODAY.
TO ALL THOSE WHINING: WTF DID YOU EXPECT? IF THE SERVERS WERE BEEFY ENOUGH TO HANDLE THE WHOLE WORLD ORDERING AT ONE TIME IT WOULD’VE BEEN OVER IN A MATTER OF MICROSECONDS. YOU KNOW THERE WERE MILLIONS OF PEOPLE OUT THERE WAITING FOR 9:00 SHARP WITH THEIR FINGER ON THEIR MOUSE. tHE CONGESTION MADE IT MORE FAIR IF ANYTHING CAUSE IT GAVE YOU OVER AN HOUR TO TRY AT IT. AT LEAST THOSE WHO GOT IT TRULY WORKED FOR IT.
“Wow that was fast! Free Day is over. Over $100k was given away in just under 1 hour and 45 minutes. We had over 1,000 orders and nearly over 70,000 unique visitors. Our servers barely stayed up!”
Sorry but no.. your servers didn’t barely stay up.
they absolutely and certainly did not. Not at all!
@Tim
Oh look at that…trollotet changed his handle. Nice try but you’re still a troll.
@timotet
“$100? really? I make that in 15 minutes.”
$400/hr, eh? I call bullshit on that.
i tried to get to checkout for like 2 hours straight the site went down like immediately true DDoS attack pretty kick ass
no, different tim here, no otet. look further up in the comments, you’ll find me.
@ tim, it wasnt a nice service to customers, it was to advertise trying to get new customers, and a convient way for them to liquidate 100 grand worth of old stock right before tax time
At first I was mad, but hey, they just gave away $100,000 worth of crap to people. Who else does that? If anything, I will buy more from them now.
I got my order in. Thanks SparkFun! I got it at the very end when $99,109.05 was gone! That was a crazy two hours. Wonder who will win the time side bet? I was an hour off.
I dont get why the fuck the aurducrapinos are so popular when propeller chips have like 2 parts to program them without a serial cable, 1 part (a serial cable) to program with. And they can do ethernet for $12….
Dumbasses!
@Tim
A lot of people at my firm make well in excess of $400 per hour. The funny thing is that didn’t stop them from wasting two hours on this deal only to fail. Go figure…
Look, people were so nice before the day:
“First thought: Yesss! I can get that graphic LCD screen I want, and some XBee gear, and … and …
Second thought: Y’know, I have a good job and I can afford to buy my own SparkFun gear. I think I’ll leave the free stuff for the people who’ll appreciate it even more than I would.
Third thought, carrying #2 a step further: Nate, if you wanna make a product code that costs $100 and sponsors another seat in the giveaway (obviously not tax deductible for the contributor), heck yeah, I’ll buy one. I expect it would add complications you don’t care to deal with, but it’s worth offering.
25098
by
PSmith
| November 23, 2009 at 4:26 PM
I’m with you, Keith. I’d like $100 worth of stuff free, but I can afford to pay for it. When I think of how desperately I wanted something like that when I was a high school kid, or even in college, I think I’d be a lot happier leaving my share to those folks.”
and now everyone seems to have gone cold turkey. It was fun trying (I didn’t get anything either) and I hope the people who got stuff have fun with it but it did great things for sparkfun advertising and it let them try their new toys/servers so all in all I think it was a pretty good day,
If you didn’t get anything then just smile and forget about it.
Mowcius
@Hackineer
Well were they getting paid while they were trying?
so now SparkFun server know daily day of female in China
@Tsujiku
No, at least I hope not… ;-)
@I hate Trolls!
Why would I change my handle?
A bunch of other people used it hence the clones
comment.
Im still a troll, wow you really hurt my feelings with that one.
I can’t say that I hate Sparkfun like some of the folks here, but I am left with a rather bitter taste.
My complaint against Sparkfun is not that I didn’t succeed in getting any free stuff, but that this experience was cruel due to the server problems. I had my cart ready the night before like many of the folks here and being stuck on that submit page for over an hour was extremeley frustrating.
Even if I didn’t succeed in beating others to the finish line, it would have been fine if it lasted only fifteen minutes and went smoothly. But the pages not loading when you I was inches from the finish line was unbearable.
Wow after feeling slightly disapointed i just got the things i needed from ebay for £28 which is something like $44 to you guys, still i really did want that Arduino starter kit and LCD for £20 shipping from spark fun :p shame the Arduino i just bought is a clone do you guys know if the clones are any good they seem just the same, the price is almost the same too i could only find clones in the uk the originals where up in hong kong and it bores me to death waiting 3 weeks to get an item!
>> haha, i just found out about this today
>> too and i got my stuff, you guys need
>> to get off the dialup
>> Posted at 11:21 am on Jan 7th, 2010 by Nimbus1992
i wasn’t on dial up, i was on a 50GB link :(
gibbo: http://www.oomlout.com is a uk store for arduino great service too
@asc
Thanks for the link i have bookmarked it there are some pretty good prices on that site too.
@To all of you clones
Just transfer to SEEEDUINO. They even have a not so crappy portable Oscilloscope.
just grab your servos for 4.90 -> 10$ on Deal extreme like the rest of us
I started trying to log-in at 08:40 Mountain Time, I never even got the Log-in page to load until about 10:45; by then it was over.
It was well worth my time… all 30 minutes worth. I used a combination of setting my browsers keep-alive/timeout settings, hard-scripting the POST from a local HTML file after each step, and using my cogentco.com connection (very few hops to rockynet). I’m the proud owner of an extech lab PSU… with full intensions of turning it on ebay, of course.
Fortunately, I loaded up my cart a few days previous. Because it took me an hour and a half to get an order, but I got it (analog soldering iron & some misc parts)
After about an hour of going nowhere (the login screen kept timing out), I realized if the browser did not respond with a “connected to sparkfun…” message immediately I would stop & reload. It seemed a random chance that you would make a connection, and another random chance that the page would load completely.
The “submit free day” button on the last page… I think I hit that one about 50 or 60 times.
i made 20 different sparkfun accounts with 20 different addresses. and i got $100 worth of free shit with 10 of them. MUAHAHAHAHA now i’m selling it all on EBAY for PROFIT (reganneville) MUAHAHAHA
I didn’t sleep and for 2 f***ing hours I kept refreshing my piece of shit sprint phone, my order was all ready to pay for but the confirmation page kept 404ing, all I had to do was enter my paypal information, guess ill never get an arduino and shall continue to belittle and rant and insult every arduino project that I come upon, arduino usb, luxeon V white and a ~10 watt solar pannel came to 99.98 :/
anyone get orders in? from the ammount of coments hackaday alone prolly killed the offer
How about next time posting about it in advance retards.
I can’t believe the people that are mad at SparkFun; they did it with good intent, and they certainly didn’t owe you anything.
Ha, $100,000 all gone in just 1hour 44min 50sec, gee, i guess anyone who is able to use internet got something for themselves, even have no idea what to do with those electronics
First of all, I got my stuff. And, this thread is absolutly hilarious!
Most are just frustrated with execution. If the website worked properly (users were queued, or they could handle 1000 some connections per second) it would have all been done in 5 minutes. People wouldn’t have wasted hours hitting the refresh button.
Some see it as a dirty publicity stunt. If they wanted to “give back to their customers” or donate to a “project”, they would have — and would have dis-qualified the people that have never posted in their forums, never supported the community, and never purchased from Sparkfun.
I really want to see the stats on how many of these “new” customers have turned into repeat customers + community growth.
I’m guessing there were better ways to get more bang for that buck.
The point is random people got the free stuff. 95% of them will never go to sparkfun again. Dedicated customers that have been buying for 3+ years got nothing. Free days should not be announced or they should have some type of site waiting line, so the first to get in line are the first people that can get stuff. Not people who are close to the datacentre and not people who were lucky enough to refresh at the right time.
Seriously, this was a DDOS lottery. Did anyone REALLY THINK that the servers would hold out during this? if you got through, you got through, if you didn’t, oh well. You don’t need to be taking a ride on the Waaahmbulance. They had a new server, and this event did 3 things for SparkFun:
First, it draws people in. They ranked #1 on Google searches for a short time by using the power of “FREE” and generating a huge storm of interest. $100,000 can’t buy that kind of attention in an ad. This was an excellent promo for them.
Second, They got to test their new servers in a worst case scenario. While many didn’t get through, the servers tried hard enough to get about 1035 orders through. This DDOS lottery was a hardcore first run test of a new system.
Third, they had the totally awesome idea to GIVE AWAY $100,000 worth of merchandise. They should be praised for this kind of unique promotion. They could have spent $100,000 on advertising, on raises, on whatever, but they chose to let around 1035 people get a gift and got the promotion and testing they needed out of it. Someone mentioned a tax write off. Makes sense to me.
What do 4/5 of the people on the internet do??? They blame SparkFun for their sore loosing. Boo Hoo!!! They blame SparkFun for not doing more to give them a direct gold plated ethernet cable to their server rack. They complain that they lost 2 hours of their life wasting their time. Or worst of all, we even get a couple people crying scam!
There’s no scam, there’s no unfairness. This was a HUGE event. With only a little over 1000 slots for actually winning the $100 credit available, I’m flabbergasted at the arrogance people show in being such sore losers. Like they deserved to win, and everyone else didn’t deserve it.
I did NOT win a single thing. I still think it was uber-cool what SparkFun did, and I’m glad I got to see it happen. I’m happy for EVERY ONE WHO WON!!! I’m glad for them! I’m bummed at not getting in, but I don’t hold any grudge against SparkFun for my not getting in. I chose to try for 3 hours to log in and get my order completed. SparkFun didn’t take that time from me. It was MY decision. SparkFun offered a WONDERFUL GIFT, and when the WHOLE OVER 9000 FREAKING INTERNET users didn’t all magically win, they hopped a ride on the Waaahmbulance to all the the blogs and comment fields to sulk and boo-hoo their brains out!
Get over yourselves, get off the Waaahmbulance, and stop being such selfish interwebs 100zerz!
SparkFun did something amazing today!
Viva La SparkFun!!!
I feel really bad for the people who were all gung-ho about this and invested a good couple of hours only to get let down; I can sympathize – personally, I wasn’t all crazy about this and although I knew about it, I forgot it was today until all the craze on teh interwebz happened. I tried to get in about half-way through but no dice. (I wanted a new digital soldering iron; I’m so poor I’m using a woodburner with a home-made tip and a hacked lamp switch on the cord – dangerous!)
That being said, Richfiles is completely right. This was a well-invested $100,000 for this company. It wasn’t about showing any particular individual love, nor do they owe anyone anything.
I think the problem that everyone keeps ignoring is that it wasn’t necessarily a good investment. Now there really isn’t a way to accurately track this, but as you can read above a lot of people who got the credit are just looking to make a buck on ebay. Theres a good chance they might not return to sparkfun at all. This is obviously inevitable to some extent, but if too many people do it, they end up with disappointed existing customers, and not much else. Someone did mention liquidating inventory before tax time, I guess I don’t know how much that is worth but maybe it was reason enough. I knew I wouldn’t have any luck on my crappy work computer, but like I have said I am happy for everyone. I just wish so many sparkfun scalpers didn’t appear outta the woodwork.
I hope it does some good for the company I just don’t know, and it probably can never be measured.
I tried for 1.5 hrs at work (got up from my bench, walk over to computer on other side of room, hit F5, come sit down at my bench, do one minute worth of work. Repeat) and didn’t get through. I did get the “Sparkfun is temorarily closed page, though!
If you are whining about SF needing better servers..why? Only on a free day will they need something better than what they have now. When thier orders go back to normal (plus the extra new customers gained from the advertising. Smart!) thier new server will be able to handle *those* customers. The paying ones.
The only downside is when I do place my order anyway (PIC & Altera programmers and MSP430 board), it will take forever before it is shipped out! I’ll have to come back in a couple weeks, maybe. All in all, it was worth participating in!
Was running scripts hard against the site trying to checkout a whole bunch of baskets. In the end, got five orders through – mostly Arduino.
Not sure what the hell an Arduino is, but looking forward to making $500 on EBay XD
Too bad to those that failed.
Thanks for the tipoff hackaday!
@ winn3r – Burn. In. Hell. (for lack of any better terms). The robotics Club at my school (me included) was really looking forward to getting some Arduinos and parts to build some robots. We have been waiting patiently since the announcement of Sparkfuns free day, with baskets ready for ordering. Its not easy as a High school student to pay for a hobby in robotics…and a$$holes like you go and screw everything up for people like us who actually NEED these things and would put them to good use instead of selling them for profit. Shame on you.
@winn3r
Congratulations on a well-executed plan. Don’t count on making $500 though. I doubt eBayers will pay anywhere near SparkFun’s jacked up prices. I bet you net closer to $300, which still isn’t bad at all for writing a script and listing a few things on eBay.
@Metal Slug 2
Easy now then, sonny. Is that also how you act when you lose a robotics competition?
Winn3r was just kidding in case you didn’t pick up on that.
@Hackineer
regardless of whether winn3r was kidding around or not, I am certain there are others who did indeed use Sparkfuns free day simply to make a quick buck – which is a shame. My anger is forwarded to them all, i just so happened across winn3rs post at that time and directed it towards them.
As to how I act in the event of losing a competition, that is a completely different story. If a loss is due to fair gameplay, and the competitors robot was better than mine, then i congratulate them and am happy for them, for they deserve what the have acheived. If however, they cheated to obtain whichever title, then I would be angry. In this case: taking free things only to sell them for profit…as opposed to leaving them for those who actually need those things, is simply wrong. I get angry that someone would be so dishonest as to do such a thing.
*stunned*
I’m just amazed at the turnout for both HaD and SF. While I agree that it helps with the bringing in of new customers, this methodology also has a bad habit of driving customers away from a service.
For a good example, look at what happened with Star Wars Galaxies. They started with a good idea, did some tweaks, then threw something out there to bring in new customers. But only time will tell how good of an investment this was.
*crosses fingers*