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$100 of free stuff from SparkFun electronics

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Plasmaarc452

Sat Jan 02 2010, 09:40PM

Registered Member #1394 Joined: Sun Mar 16 2008, 06:18PM
Location:
Posts: 111

I am going to be waiting in the checkout cart with everything set up but its hard to know when they will actually go live with the offer. They need to base there traffic off of some online clock like

that way they can't really mess it up or give us a similar place to get time information on their site. The best clock that I can bet on is going to be a cell phone because it updates via cell towers and satellites. Its just that if you are 1 or 2 minutes off the orders could be all gone.

I don't think " There will be hundreds of thousands of people already sitting on the order page ready to click "Checkout" " I think there will be between 1,000 and 5.000 waiting at most because since Sparkfun was formed back in like 2003 (dorm room store) until now they have only shipped a few hundred thousand orders. So if they have hundreds of thousands of customers that are going to buy stuff on ONE day it would equal slightly less, all ,or more orders than they made in 6 years on 1 day which is highly unlikely. Keep in mind that just because they have hundreds of thousands of orders it doesn't mean that they have that many customers because many people make multiple orders over time so they may have say 25,000 customers.

Whoever gets it will be lucky but that's why I want a specific time because the people that play it safe and wait till 9:05 will get screwed over because this deal will only last a minute at most.

rp181

Sat Jan 02 2010, 09:52PM

Registered Member #1062 Joined: Tue Oct 16 2007, 02:01AM
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Posts: 1529

they said the order page will tell you that you have the credit, so it is probably automated (computer time). If its not there, you go back and try again.

Plasmaarc452

Sun Jan 03 2010, 12:44AM

Registered Member #1394 Joined: Sun Mar 16 2008, 06:18PM
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Posts: 111

Refreshing the page takes time especially since the site will be loaded so by getting the correct time the first time around you would have a greater chance of getting the credit. I hope I get it, because I am ordering a new soldering station and a handful of sensors about ($250 worth) and it will only cost me about $150 (Christmas money) because of freeday. If I don't get the credit, I don't get any sensors just a soldering station

which that wouldn't be cool.

Conundrum

Sun Jan 03 2010, 11:27AM

Registered Member #96 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4061

btw try and get some of these

infrared non contact thermometers, ideal for object/person detection.

interestingly these could be used in conjunction with a pan/tilt unit to make a poor man's thermal imager.

-A

rp181

Sun Jan 03 2010, 05:03PM

Registered Member #1062 Joined: Tue Oct 16 2007, 02:01AM
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Posts: 1529

I don't think so. The divergence of those is rather high, and you need a Fresnel lense.

Plasmaarc452

Sun Jan 03 2010, 06:47PM

Registered Member #1394 Joined: Sun Mar 16 2008, 06:18PM
Location:
Posts: 111

Yea I saw those infrared heat sensors but I am not sure as to how you would interface it with say an arduino for starters. I have a basic idea with SPI but if someone would write a nice clear tutorial on using them with sample code and a diagram of how they hooked it up I would buy it without a doubt.

Z28Fistergod

Thu Jan 07 2010, 06:17PM

Registered Member #2040 Joined: Fri Mar 20 2009, 10:13PM
Location: Fairfax VA
Posts: 180

Did anybody get anything? I first checked the website at 9am eastern time and couldn't get the page to load. I continued to check every 20 minutes or so and just got through to find out it was already over.

I didn't get the page to load once, so I don't know how anyboldy could manage to complete an order. Oh well.

Mattski

Thu Jan 07 2010, 06:32PM

Registered Member #1792 Joined: Fri Oct 31 2008, 08:12PM
Location: University of California
Posts: 527

I only tried a few times at 9AM MST and couldn't get in, so I decided to go back to bed. Oh well - I didn't really expect to get anything.

Edit: I can get to the website now, looks like it was all over in 1 hour 44 minutes and 50 seconds.

Plasmaarc452

Thu Jan 07 2010, 07:08PM

Registered Member #1394 Joined: Sun Mar 16 2008, 06:18PM
Location:
Posts: 111

This day was complete b*ll$h*t, they GROSSLY underestimated the traffic they would be receiving. On top of that I kept getting php errors in firefox (improper programming).

What Sparkfun needs to do is first STOP trying to run your own servers, they paid like $25,000 for their 5 rack servers then threw them in a big data center hoping they would handle the load with oscommerce running lol. They are fairly beefy servers but they could have done better um maybe they could have rented 10 full racks for a few hours to host the site along with the massive bandwidth capability they would need.

I have purchased close to a thousand dollars in stuff from Sparkfun over the years and will continue doing so but if they ever pull a stunt like this again DO IT RIGHT!!!!

Conundrum

Thu Jan 07 2010, 07:42PM

Registered Member #96 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4061

Hi all.
Needless to say, the servers all just went Strange Loop. I was having problems with checkout even before the deadline.

Did anyone manage to get their order to go through?

I soooo want to see the "traffic vs time" graph... :)

regards, -A

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