Is promoting Arduino related products spam?

Suppose someone has some Arduino related products that they might want to announce in this forum. Is there any place to make such announcements without being considered spam? I've noted that some products are announced in the News forum, but I want to verify that it is okay before posting anything.

Smiley

seems a lot of people do it, and since your active in the community we all know your only point is to not sell us crap ...

course I am not an official

Now the suspension will kill us .. what new and exciting Arduino-related products have you got?????

Suspension will kill us?

Well maybe if we were in a car and the suspension was wacky and we went out of control...
I believe you meant suspense

Smiley has a new book about Arduino out:

I don't know anything about it, but I've been wondering whether it was going to be announced on the Arduino Forums (after seeing some discussion over on AVR Freaks.)

On a related topic, I've been thinking that Arduino might have reached the point where a "Market" topic in the forums might be a useful idea. Although the unusually International nature of the community might complicate matters...

I dont have a problem with a market idea as long as its used by community members

vs lets say sparkfun who only bothers to show up around here to promote their interest while we get to debug and support their half broken (and totally ripped off) crap every single day

(back on topic)

smiley, that looks like a great addition to what lit there is for the arduino, and I love that you can "test drive" the book on your site

looks well done!

vs lets say sparkfun who only bothers to show up around here to promote their interest while we get to debug and support their half broken (and totally ripped off) crap every single day

Don't hold back, share your real feelings ;D

Actually I've had good luck with the things I've purchased so far from SF, but then again problems can be pretty specific to the actual product bought. I do like the pretty little red boxes they ship stuff in :wink:

Lefty

Nice one Smiley!

Sparkfun-less don't like people posting problems in their forums when they do happen, and their level of support is a bit hit and miss from my experience.

They are expensive so you'd think they'd have their act together, there are plenty of cheaper alternative suppliers on the web for most of the products I've ever considered buying from them.

But I like the layout of their store and vast selection of products.

Hey Osgeld - I apologize for what you think may be abuse of the forum. I have the best intentions of participating within the Arduino community. I choose to spend my time other places than the support forum. You guys do a much better job than I can at support - I'm better at hardware and logistics (I think :)).

John - I can't remember ever discouraging folks from posting on the forum, especially negative feedback. We certainly can't help everyone but we do genuinely accept criticism. Unabashed users are what makes forums both bad and great.

Great book Joe! Thanks for sending us one. I enjoyed reading it! I'll email you with some feedback.

-Nathan

Nathan you own sparkfun right?

you guys phooking rock!

well it is refreshing to see someone from sparkfun saying something other than "check out what were offering"

but

I choose to spend my time other places than the support forum. You guys do a much better job than I can at support

this is not the sparkfun support forum, and maybe if you guys put a bit more effort into your forum threads I would not be as harsh

but just glancing through your forums there are endless amounts of support questions with zero replies, when I got my ubw32 I had tons of questions, but I never bothered to post there. Why should I? As it is most likely would be a waste for me to type and chances are no one is going to bother

maybe this is the discouraging aspect John was talking about? It sure as L is not encouraging, in fact It made me feel like I just got suckered into something (HA HA you bought a non standard PIC platform from us and good luck getting any help)

Im not saying you have to attack every question like your life depended on it, but some acknowledgment would be nice.

SO, some sort of community involvement, more so than just "we are", more support from your end, and some price restructuring (seriously 5$ for a CD4051??? 80$ for a china ripoff hakko that sells for 45$???) and I think we all can get along fine

till then expect me to continue to be a mouth :wink:

ps: see that @ssh0le under my avatar, yea that was what your last staff member who posted here decided to call me, along with some other things

we really do not need name calling from a "professional" company now do we?

[edit]sorry for derailing your thread Smiley [/edit]

I used to think I was a cynical grumpy geek, maybe theres hope for me yet....... ::slight_smile:

I used Smiley's Butterfly cookbook & kit. It was very helpful. I'm sure his Arduino kit is worth the money. He's correct, the internet is full of info but hard on beginners. No - I'm not his nephew. In fact I may be older than him :slight_smile:


I do not understand the attack on Sparkfun. I've bought a number of products from them and have ALWAYS been satisfied. Nobody's perfect but they are a good vendor. I'm not their cousin either :slight_smile:

If you think about marketing: we are all basically providing free marketing for Arduino. Arduino is a platform product that greatly benefits from our discussions.
Everyime somebody shows off with some new Arduino application it is likely to get featured by Hack a Day or other blogs. The cummulative effect is that Arduino gets more attention.
Arduino even benefits from discussions about better alternatives. Because in the end absolute beginners will always default to the "real" thing because the price differences are not that big.

And Arduino itself is not the lone inventor of this great AVR platform. It started with Atmel providing really low cost development tools, people writing the AVR-Libc and others providing gcc, avrdude and so on. So Arduino just created some nice package that lowered the entry hurdle (both price and diificulty levels) even further. However one can come to the conclusion that they also benefit from developments of others.

So I would expect that it is absolutely OK for members of the community to market their own stuff in order to benefit a little bit as well. Even more so for active members.

Udo