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…
624 thoughts on “SparkFun’s Free Day Is Nearly Upon Us…”
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Finally got to my shopping cart after 53 minutes of trying.
8465 given away
Great I’ve been sitting here afraid to drive to work thinking the second I leave the house the site will be up and running.
Damn you SF. I’m gonna lose my job over your little stunt.
….and now all the sudden I’m logged out of my sparkfun account. FML
Over $10k so far. Obviously some people can get in. I must not have their karma. :(
PING sparkfun.com (207.174.76.106) 56(84) bytes of data.
— sparkfun.com ping statistics —
431 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 430017ms
9659 so far
I hate it, it looks like the page finally loaded because it loads the title bar and says sparkfun rather than loading, then I check but there is nothing on the page
I get into the home page, click the log in, then it falls to its knees!!!
@Jim- well 100 ppl in an hour….still might slow
I love seeing the title bar load… 5 minutes later a page.. then…. nothing
Error message from sparkfun: Something Broke!
No sh*t!
12k
10,703.02 given away
$12,471
Maybe their server is set up to block pings. You are only making things worse by pinging them.
Hey Rune, or anyone…What is sparkfun’s phone number?
continue attacking the site, lets see who have more patients
$12,571.08
had all of the components for this>>> http://hackaday.com/2009/11/03/apple-remote-arduino-shield/ ,
then sparkfun wont let me buy htem, nice toutorial though!
Got it to load once, never again. At least now I can say that I participated in a DOS attack. One more thing to strike off the ol’ bucket list.
I can firefox to get “Connected to http://www.sparkfun.com” Even got a blank page to load twice.
i really need this gear. lost my job, and my box of electronics gear (3 aruinos, scavenged parts, all my little pieces iv acquired) was stolen when i had to move out of my place. all i wanted was a range finder, an arduino, and a DOS-on-a-chip so i could get back to what i enjoy.
now all i want to do is chain smoke and press F5 for the rest of the day, DAMN YOU SPARKFUN FOR GETTING MY HOPES UP
~10k in an hour? i doubt the pace will quicken much, so it sounds like we’ve got some time to get through.
No sense in calling. They don’t take phone orders, and can’t tell you if your order went through or not.
As much as I applaud the free stuff giveaway, I’m starting to think that they’re going to piss as many folks off as they make happy today, with their servers being so unprepared for the onslaught.
Way to be positive JEFF-O!
i even tried to connect through my root server :(
A couple times i got my “check out page” to stop loading, it just gave me a blank page. CURSE YOU!
I can pull up my shopping cart page once every few minutes but I still haven’t been able to get to the checkout page.
Has anyone gotten anything? If so, post and give us hope.
I have actually been to their warehouse, this actually doesn’t surprise me. The visit gave me no confidence in either their judgement or their connection to reality.
13,630.53…
https://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/checkout_shipping.php?refresh=1
This is the link to checkout anyway, for those who would like a shortcut
@therian
hahaha yeah really if those dicks want their free crap to sell they better work for it like we are trying =(
$13,926.43. Checkout page, entered CC info, waiting…
13,330 and the site just gave up again as I hit my cart.
Their servers Melted. It’s been dead to me from 5 minutes before the giveaway. Someone’s DDOSing routers on the path to them as well to try and adjust the odds.
Looks like something isn’t working right with the ISP
Tracing route to sparkfun.com [207.174.76.106]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 10.65.110.5
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 46 ms 15 ms 18 ms network-024-160-229-108.wi.rr.com [24.160.229.1
8]
4 20 ms 17 ms 13 ms tge2-0-0.chcgil1-rtr0.mwrtn.rr.com [24.160.230.
]
5 12 ms 12 ms 11 ms 66.109.6.204
6 19 ms 17 ms 21 ms ae-0-0.pr0.chi10.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.153]
7 11 ms 15 ms 33 ms te9-2.ccr02.ord03.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.11
145]
8 13 ms 16 ms 14 ms te3-4.mpd02.ord01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.25
69]
9 36 ms 37 ms 48 ms te2-2.mpd01.mci01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.25
77]
10 44 ms 223 ms 212 ms te4-4.mpd01.den01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.24
81]
11 47 ms 51 ms 46 ms gi0-1.na01.b000530-0.den01.atlas.cogentco.com [
8.112.35.202]
12 334 ms 257 ms 273 ms rockynet.demarc.cogentco.com [38.99.208.86]
13 51 ms 50 ms 49 ms sta-208-139-196-28.rockynet.com [206.168.229.28
14 * * * Request timed out.
15 * * * Request timed out.
You figure living in the same state would help but it doesnt.
I got to the checkout page!
And they have the wrong shipping address as my main address, but at this point I don’t very much care if they send it to my parents house.
15124.18
For those of you, this wont help worth a dam!
http://hackaday.com/2009/04/01/how-to-fix-your-stupid-internet/
Just got in, slowly but surely,
https://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/checkout_shipping.php?refresh=1
delete the “refresh=1”
which gives you:
https://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/checkout_shipping.php?
worked for me.
LOL got this error
“Something broke.
…not to worry. We’ve logged this error and will be looking into it, but please don’t hesitate to mail it@sparkfun.com and complain.”
I got to the checkout button. Then it timed out.
14,624.23 at 10:05.
@DETN8R: Yeah, I was wondering if they’d have to restrict connections to a specific area (say, locking out other countries) – but, I guess not.
15524.03$
ARGH, SPARKFAIL INDEED.
been trying for the past hour to check out and the thing just hangs at the checkout page!
Chain smoking sounds like a plan right about now this is becomeing really annoying really needed a serial white on black LCD screen and a usb auridno starter
What’s worse it to actually get to the final page of the checkout process and see that you qualify for the discount, only to be greeted with timeout server not responding after submitting order. Hopefully the order went through and the confirmation is slow to come. I definitely made it to the shipping and payment pages and clicked “Submit this order to try for the Free Day discount!” Time will tell. Good luck to all.
13 51 ms 50 ms 49 ms sta-208-139-196-28.rockynet.com [206.168.229.28
probebly their ISP and from there in will be dead and dying routers and servers
$16720,
Just got through, Arduino, Ethernet Shield and some other random stuff.
I’ve been trying for an hour. Its now 4am where I live!