Heh. Take a look at the EEVblog form for 'dogy crowdfunded projects' for some fun reading (http://www.eevblog.com/forum/crowd-funded-projects/ http://www.eevblo

Heh. Take a look at the EEVblog form for 'dogy crowdfunded projects' for some fun reading (http://www.eevblog.com/forum/crowd-funded-projects/ http://www.eevblog.com/forum/crowd-funded-projects/). The experienced people there can often rate a project's "bull$hit factor" just by costing out the BOM and assembly and comparing it to the offer price. Regarding Bluetooth (LE), I've got a history with ARM stuff so stuck with Nordic's offerings. Cypress & CSI have nice stuff, but they really lock you into their environments, IMHO. I've got a nice full-stack gcc-4.9 based dev/debug flow for the full Nordic stack, and that makes my development way easier (and much, much cheaper since I don't need to hassle with IAR or Keil). Mind you, I'm also comfortable with writing newlib CRT routines from scratch, so what's "comfortable and cost-effective" for me may not match your dev team's experience. Anyway, back to BLE and KS. I found that the vast majority of 'small BLE device' Kickstarters seemed to massively underestimate the cost and complexity of both EMC design/certification, and Bluetooth SIG compliance/certification. That stuff is expensive! As you may or may not know, if you design your own circuitry, you need to qualify your entire radio PHY and do a hardware re-qual. That's on top of FCC/IC/CE/TELEC certifications. It ain't cheap and it ain't a pretty process. I ended up going with an Insight SiP ISP130301 Bluetooth LE Module because they had awesome antenna characteristics, were mechanically robust, they included the optional timing crystal that I wanted, and were relatively inexpensive (~8 USD in Q1000). Using one of those, you do NOT have to do B-SIG qualifications (as long as you use the qualified vendor BLE stack), and as long as you use an approved antenna (usually fixed and included on the module) you only have to do FCC (or equivalent) testing that any/all consumer electronics need to go through. For under Q10k, that's a no-brainer in price and ease-of-integration.