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Reminder: 1/7/10 is SparkFun Free Day (get a free Arduino)

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Re: Reminder: 1/7/10 is SparkFun Free Day (get a free Arduino)

#71

Post by Jach »

kellishaver wrote: post #63
julsonl wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasted my entire morning. Still contemplating on getting at least an Arduino Starter Kit...

I'm going to get the starter kit, but since I have to pay for it, it's cheaper from Hacktronics. They call it something else, but it looks to be the same kit, or maybe better, for my purposes. http://www.hacktronics.com/Arduino/Arduino-Educational-Learn... I wanted "Programming Interactivity" as well, which is cheaper on Amazon.

I was going for that too, but wanted the "Making Things Talk" book (which is also cheaper on Amazon). Getting the individual pieces for the kit on sparkfun was also cheaper than getting the kit, and you could get a full size breadboard too. Thanks for the find.

Re: Reminder: 1/7/10 is SparkFun Free Day (get a free Arduino)

#73

Post by aarongough »

aarongough wrote: post #68

Wow. As of 1:00pm EST my browser is not even sitting and trying to load... The connection immediately times out. Perhaps they realized that the site had become unusable and have pulled the plug to try to reduce the load while implementing a fix? I've never had to do it but I should imagine that a local reverse proxy cache should be able to be setup pretty quickly... That would definitely help them with their main pag…

It would appear that I was partly correct. The site is back up now and performing much, much better from what I have seen. Free Day is officially over though (apparently they gave away the whole $100k!) so perhaps the load they're seeing is now just drastically reduced...

Re: Reminder: 1/7/10 is SparkFun Free Day (get a free Arduino)

#74

Post by aarongough »

johkra wrote: post #12
dtby wrote: post #8

1/7/10 Why in the world would one choose this as the date format, if not 'forced' to do so by faithful reproduction of an external title? It seems that even on SparkFun's site they would use 2010.01.07.

I actually agree, it's very confusing. I'm European and I would write 07.01.2010. On topic: I, too, am Arduino shopping. First I though about getting a Spartan FPGA development board, but I honestly don't think I'll have the time to learn enough to make useful things with it. It's a really cool action by SparkFun and I hope it will be a success for them.

I'm Australian, but I work in Canada. I have never been able to get the date formatting here right all the time...

Now, whenever I have to write a date by hand I make it impossible to misread. Like so:

01/Jan/2010

Re: Reminder: 1/7/10 is SparkFun Free Day (get a free Arduino)

#75

Post by kellishaver »

Jach wrote: post #71
kellishaver wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to get the starter kit, but since I have to pay for it, it's cheaper from Hacktronics. They call it something else, but it looks to be the same kit, or maybe better, for my purposes. http://www.hacktronics.com/Arduino/Arduino-Educational-Learn... I wanted "Programming Interactivity" as well, which is cheaper on Amazon.

I was going for that too, but wanted the "Making Things Talk" book (which is also cheaper on Amazon). Getting the individual pieces for the kit on sparkfun was also cheaper than getting the kit, and you could get a full size breadboard too. Thanks for the find.

Hmm, I never thought to price them individually. I'd just assumed that the kit would be cheaper. I wonder how many kits they sell based on that assumption? Oh well. Even with shipping from hacktronics it was still $5 cheaper than sparkfun's base price before shipping. I built radios and stuff as a kid, but I've never done any micro-controller programming... should be fun. :)
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