Degradation of Website Resources and Product Pages

[mowoodsiii]

I’m not sure of a better place to put this…but I’ll voice my concerns here…

Y’all, especially with the switch over to the new website, I find it’s become very difficult to find helpful documentation on your products (particularly your legacy products). For instance, this Opto-Isolator. You provide the datasheet and design files, and that’s it. I don’t know what the pinout is, I don’t know what the pins are rated to. I know more about the IC than I do about the breakout! While I can take the time to re-install EAGLE to open the files, then parse through the datasheet to back out how how to use the breakout, it’s really no replacement for providing a datasheet or hookup guide of its own.

I feel like I’ve been running into this WAY more often lately… call me crazy but I feel like the new website broke a lot of links to content or just lost it entirely and now I have to reverse engineer all your breakout boards in order to understand how to use them. For me: I’m not going to waste my time doing that. For learners: It’s just as indiscernible as handing them the IC and sending them on their way.

I’d like to see some pride taken in rejuvenating what made Sparkfun special: Making the ball of worms that is Electrical Engineering a little more palatable…

[Steve_Taylor]

Yes, I’ve found a host of broken stuff when looking for products too, to the extent the only solution to getting an answer was to post in the forum.

[wttaft]

The website has declined significantly, and all support has to offer on the forum is to try the Internet Archive since they can/will not post their old website’s information.

Documentation for Retired Products

Emailing that many might have triggered our anti-bot/spam filtering stuff…it doesn’t like blanket emails I agree with what everyone has said as well, but these decisions are above me - it’s made my day-to-day much more difficult lol…but apparently there are larger factors at play The main workaround I use without needing to refer to internal stuff is using the wayback machine for the products…any from 2024 or earlier are decent candidates It’s not ideal and it loads really slow, but it’s better than not being able to access them IMO

[wttaft]

@mowoodsiii

I’d like to see some pride taken in rejuvenating what made Sparkfun special: Making the ball of worms that is Electrical Engineering a little more palatable…

I have a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering because of this (my bachelor’s degree is in Naval Architecture, so it was a decent course change). In fact, I built my thesis project boards with a wonderful Sparkfun-branded soldering iron I bought back in 2013. Unfortunately, the Sparkfun magic is fading fast.