Sparkfun giving away $100 per person in free electronics+S/H on 1/7/10

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!

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

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?

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!

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!

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!

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.

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.

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

P.S. DD/MM/YYYY please

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

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

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

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

Most awesome thing ever.