

Sparkfun giving away $100 per person in free electronics+S/H on 1/7/10 - arfrank
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/news.php?id=305

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kqr2
Website was super slow for me, so here's the text of the offer

    
    
      You can blame it on Chris Anderson's book Free. After reading his book, I started kicking around the idea of what we can do that's 'free'. Sure, we have free bits (open-source hardware designs, available code, etc.), but we don't have free physical widgets. Now combine that with our love of creating shear havoc (AVC, C&D letter, Portable Rotary Phone), and you get Free Day.
      
      Nobody gives away a free physical thing. There's always a catch. So up front: you have to pay shipping. Other than that, it's open season.
      
          * $100 max per household
          * You pay shipping
          * Limit of $100,000 in giveaways for the day
          * Starts 9AM MST January 7th, 2010
          * Ends 11PM MST January 7th, 2010 (or when we hit $100k, whichever comes first)
          * Rainchecks for popular items will be allowed
      
      Why are we doing this? It's not that I want to create hell for the shipping, production, and the IT teams at SparkFun. There's a multitude of reasons.
      
      First and foremost, we want to give back. We've had a stellar year in 2009, and it's all because of you. So please, have a beer (or a Stepper Motor Driver) on us.
      
      Second: We wish we could sponsor more groups but we don't have a sound way of selecting appropriate projects. Because we can't afford to say yes to everyone, we have to say no to everyone. It pains us every time we have to do it. So this is a way for us to evenly enable all the students and great minds of the world to pickup a $100 worth of free gear. Go for it!
      
      Third: Free Day will possibly create a maelstrom of site traffic, the likes of which our servers have not seen. At the beginning of December, 2009, SparkFun will be graduating out of its high-chair and moving into a server cluster. We are excited to have the breathing room, and Free Day will help us evaluate just how much breathing room we're getting. We'll do everything in our power to keep the site up but please understand that the site may go down.
      
      Fourth: We turn 7 years old! SparkFun is now over 70 employees and is the ripe old age of 49 (in business and dog years). We'd like to celebrate our birthday with a party.
      
      More nitty gritty details:
      
          * There is no special code to type in. But you get only one order on Free Day, so spend it well!
          * Only one $100 credit per household. We ask that you respect this limit and don't try to abuse this gift.
          * There is no minimum or maximum order. You can spend more than $100, the balance of which will be charged to your method of payment.
          * Only Credit Card and Paypal orders will be eligible for the $100 credit. We don't want to have people tying up inventory with POs, wire transfers, checks in the mail, or lost faxes.
          * You will see whether or not your order qualifies for a credit in the checkout process.
          * Free Day does not apply to our distributors. Sorry!
          * Every order isn't going to ship on Free Day, or for a few days after. We've got extra tape guns on hand, but please be patient and give us some time to catch up!
          * We are ratcheting up inventory for Free Day, but backorders (a.k.a. rainchecks) are allowed on most items (some items we simply can't get anymore). We'll get you your goodies just as soon as we can get them back in stock.
      
      As we usually do things here at SparkFun, these rules are open for revision. We may need to tweak them as our astute users point out how silly we are. If we have to make any changes to the rules, we'll let you all know here on our homepage. So mark January 7th, 2010 on your calendars - it's Free Day!

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proee
Sparkfun is a great company. I hope they see a great ROI after this giveaway.

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bockris
They will probably see ROI from me. I've bought stuff from them in the past
and even if I don't get in on this deal (I'm sure they will hit their 100K
limit in minutes) I'll remember the offer and be more likely to shop with them
in the future. If I do get in on the deal, I plan on 'rewarding' them with a
bunch of repeat business. Not every company can do this but I think it will
really work for SF.

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saikat
This looks awesome! I've always wanted to get into some amateur robotics or
circuitry but honestly know nothing and haven't really invested any money in
it. Any suggestions about what the most fun thing to buy for under $100 on
Sparkfun would be for a complete noob to hardware?

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blhack
I commented below with a couple of projects I have done, but this would be my
suggestion:

Get an Arduino

Get an ethernet shield for it

Get an LCD screen

Get some servos (or scavenge them from old RC stuff if you have it).

Get LOTS of those little jumper wires, they're really helpful.

That should be ~$100...and will keep you entertained for a while (at least it
has me) :).

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jvdb
Depending on your motives, a fun alternative to the popular Arduino for
getting into microcontrollers is just ordering the naked parts and wire them
yourself on a breadboard, following Sparkfun's excellent tutorials ("Beginning
Embedded Electronics" on <http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/tutorials.php>).
They start out very basic with building a 5V circuit, connecting an AVR,
programming it, adding a crystal and a RS232 level shifter to talk to your
serial port, etc, all well explained for beginners. As a software person eager
to learn the electronics behind it I've had a lot of fun that way. Great
company!

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dylanz
Wow, this is fantastic. If you were thinking about getting into electronics,
but haven't made the jump... now's your chance! I'm sure you could pick up a
starters arduino kit for < $100.

I'll see you on the 7th!

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yan
I guess I'll know what site I'll be refreshing at 10:58am EST..

I bought ~$200 worth of stuff from Sparkfun earlier this year and they were a
pleasure to deal with. Great company!

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yardie
This is awesome. I've been sitting on the fence for a while. It's 2010 and
international shipping is still a problem for almost every country except
Amazon for some reason.

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tibbon
I'm thinking that the publicity that they'll get prior to then (and the
orders) will hopefully exceed the $100K for them. Awesome company and I love
ordering from them.

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runinit
This is an amazing deal, I hope I can score some free stuff that day :).

P.S. DD/MM/YYYY please

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bravura
No. YYYY/MM/DD because that is: a) easy to sort b) unambiguous regardless of
your preferred convention.

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EventHorizon
YYYY-MM-DD would be even better.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601>

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julsonl
I hope this will be my chance to get my first Arduino. Cool!

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blhack
Pretty pretty pretty please do. Arduinos are _really_ fun. If you get one, get
the ethernet module for it at well (or, in arduino parlance: the ethernet
shield).

Last night, I finally got my ethernet module working the way I wanted it
to...it seriously felt like the first time I glanced into a compiler back
before I was even a teenager...it was _sooo_ fun. I'm sure I annoyed more than
one of my friends emailing about it at 2:00am. :-P

This is the project I was doing: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMAunBsv3xA>

Seriously seriously seriously get one. They are a _lot_ of fun :).

This was another one I did:
<http://www.gibsonandlily.com/blog/permalink.cgi?blog_id=74>

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TrevorJ
Very cool thing to do, thank you to the sparkfun team.

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vaksel
well that settles it, going to have to do my promotion before the 7th.

$5K worth of prizes just doesn't compare to $100K

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tybris
Most awesome thing ever.

