Free Day 2012 will be on Wednesday January 11th, starting at 9AM Mountain Time. We will be increasing the pool to $200,000 this year (2011 was pretty amazing!). We will have some sort of a system to verify you're not a robot and if you're the lucky person that minute, you'll win a $100 gift code. That's it. Now go enjoy your turkey.

Wait, wait - what are you talking about Nate?

Oh sorry! You've not been here for the previous two Free Days. It's this thing we do to give back to our community and at the same time get some new friends to join the party. You come, you try, you might win a $100 gift code.

The Pool: 2011 is finishing up to be our best year yet. It looks like 2011 will be about 30% larger than last year so the Free Day 2012 pool will be 30% larger than last year's pool. That's $200k! That would buy you alot of heat shrink.

The Rules: The give away starts at 9AM MST (I'm sorry New Zealand!) and is limited to $100 per person (I call no cheating). Each winner will get a gift code that can be used on SparkFun within 60 days. There might be some slight modifications to the rules as time goes on, but don't fret - we will make any additional rules well-known prior to the big day.

The System: We're doing away with the quiz system of 2011 and trying to return to a give-away system that is as simple as possible, but can handle the load of the Free Day crowd. The system will randomly give away the 2,000 prizes (2000 * $100 = $200,000) through out the day. For example, if we set up a 7 hour giveaway window, we should see a gift given away about every 12 seconds. We will allow people to try for the prize as many times as they'd like, but we will have a basic system to prove you're not a script (sometimes robots can be bad).

So that's it! We hope you'll be able to stop by and join in the madness. Mark your calendars now, but we'll make a few reminder posts between now and the big day. Also, a reminder we'll be closed November 24th and 25th (Thursday and Friday) for Thanksgiving. In the mean time, enjoy the holiday (USA) and we hope you find some free time to start project #23 of your long list. Remember to join us on the 11th of January as well. No matter how the day goes it's always a lot of fun!