I put together the [SparkFun Retired Products Archive Reference]( SparkFun Retired Products Archive Reference ) from the Internet Archive’s [Wayback Machine](https://web.archive.org/) crawls of the SparkFun website. It’s a little crude, but it does link to archived product information pages for nearly 6000 products.
I hope this helps someone.
That is amazing! I would not call it crude, it is certainly better than what SparkFun was willing to do. It helps me in that it is consolidated and I will not have to go back and forth looking for information
Glad you found it useful. I call it crude because it’s unstyled HTML. Its search function is the one in your browser. If anyone wants to take the data and make it nicer, feel free.
I don’t blame SparkFun for making the decision to cast off legacy products. If you can’t source them, you can’t help customers with them. I only made the archive because I inherited a [SparkFun SerIO]( SparkFun SerIO - DEV-09521 - SparkFun Electronics ) and wanted to know how to make it work.
I don’t blame SparkFun for making the decision to cast off legacy products. If you can’t source them, you can’t help customers with them.
I disagree. Everything I bought from SparkFun was sold with a promise of lifetime support (my last order from them was in 2019). I paid more to buy a product from SparkFun, as opposed to buying some cheap knockoff from eBay or some other online marketplace, with the expectation that this promise would be honored. My expectations for support were minimal: continued access to the documentation that was available at the time I placed my order. It’s not like I expected to talk directly to a knowledgeable technician every time I had a problem.
Unusually, there’s evidence that this removal was willful and it is not expected that the literature will be restored. ‘Sorry. We took it away and it’s not coming back.’ While disappointing, that’s the answer, it says a lot, and it’s far more than most organizations will ever give.
Seven months on and it looks like this is the answer. Nearly ten months after asking for information for currently available products they still have not fixed links to documentation. The funny thing is many of the documents for the retired products are still available today on SparkFun’s publicly accessible server but there are not links to them from their website.
This is very disappointing.
As an update: The good news is we now have a system in place for notifying someone when there is a dead link that has had more than 20 attempted clicks in a week, and they’re being prioritized in that manner
Without getting to in-the-weeds the issue stems from our old backend and new backend having very different architectures