Free Day is January 13th, 2011! It hurts so good! We're getting ready for Free Day 2011. Pocket $100 worth of free stuff! Free Day has a few twists this year. It'll will be upon us on January 13th. We're opening up our doors and letting anyone take $100 worth of free goodies. Favorited Favorite 0

You knew it was coming....

We are going to have another Free Day on January 13th, 2011 starting at 9AM MST. Wait - you don't know what we're talking about? Oh, well take a bit of time and read up on the post and comments on the original announcement of Free Day 2010, the day of, and the recap. There's over 1,000 comments on those posts so don't dally too long...

Disclaimer: You can help to bring us to our knees again. One of the benefits from Free Day 2010 was the massive load test we threw at our servers. It was a very effective, self-inflicted denial of service attack that showed us where the problems were within our system. We’ve been spending the past 11 months upgrading our hardware by orders of magnitude and completely re-writing our website to squeeze out every efficiency available. Will Free Day 2011 bring our servers to their knees again? It most likely will, but Free Day 2011 will continue to push us to improve our systems for non-Free Days. In other words, please come join the party, we need your help to punish our server bank.

To refresh your memory, last year we gave away $100,000 based on a system of giving $100 (max) per household. The event was scheduled to last all day, but we reach $100K in an hour and 44 minutes. Had the website not crawled to a halt, it undoubtedly would've been even faster.

We learned a lot from last year and as much as we would like to keep Free Day simple and clever, we’re not going to. Here are the rules for Free Day 2011:

First and foremost, we want to give back. We grew by over 50% from 2009 to 2010 so we figured we’d increase the pool by as much. We are going to be giving away $150,000 to users and potentially $30,000 to charity. Our Goal: Get as many new people introduced to SparkFun as possible.

Numero dos: We have some amazing customers who have been with us from the beginning and we'd like to show a bit of appreciation. We are going to offer $10 credit for every year (365 days) since your first order. Let’s say you bought something on January 2nd, 2006. You will be offered $50 to claim on Free Day 2011. Goal: To reward customers who have been with us since the beginning. You know who you are (Bill aka phalanx, our fantastic forum moderator).

We want to educate people of the basics of electronics. We will be asking a series of different questions on Free Day. When you get a question right, $10 in credit will be instantaneously added to your account. For every question you get wrong, you lose $3. Skipping a question is $0. Limit is $100 per customer or when the $150,000 is given away. These are not trivia questions, these will be very basic knowledge questions about hardware and how to use it. We will be describing the importance of the problem, how to solve the problem, and then ask the reader to solve a similar problem. Checkout the Bite Sized Primer tutorials for some of the material we'll be basing the questions off of. If you're a regular user, you know all this by heart! Goal: Educate new users on the basics.

On Free Day, you will be given the option to either take the ‘gimme’ money based on your account age or try for $100 by answering questions. You cannot do both. Remember: We may give away all the money before you can answer the full 10 questions. Which will you choose?

All credit must be used within 60 days of Free Day: This will give you time to spend your credits on what you really want. It will also help me prevent a mutiny in shipping. Last year's Free Day was wickedly painful for the awesome people in shipping. By spending your credit throughout two months, you will help us spread out the packaging of orders a bit.

For every question answered correctly, we will donate $2 to a collection of three local, international, and technical charities: The Gathering Place, The Hunger Project, and The X-Prize. Goal: Encourage education and at the same time give cold hard cash to folks that need it.

As with most of our ideas, they are rarely formed correctly from the beginning. We have to reserve the right to change things around in case we come up with better rules.

We heart Freenode. We kind of slammed their servers last year as the SparkFun IRC chat room exploded during Free Day 2010. We've donated a bit to them in hopes they'll continue to let us host our public chat room on their servers. You can always chime in and say 'hello' on the SparkFun IRC room on a normal day and hopefully during Free Day 2011.

So that's it. And oh ya, we will be in a tryptophan trance for the next few days, so please forgive us while our offices are on a skeleton staff until Monday, November 29th. If you have any additional questions about Free Day 2011, leave them in the comments here and we will do our best to answer them. We hope your Thanksgiving holiday (or end-of-week for the rest of the world) is a great one. Cheers!