[eekee]

The hard limit is to do with practicalities of low-volume production when you're not sure if enough people will buy them. All ten boards need to be funded (one way or another) for production to go ahead at all.

Another practicality is the EU's draconian electronics-approval laws. The USA exempts prototypes from approval, but the EU doesn't. The board designer is German, so EU laws mean he can't legally sell or even give away these boards himself, unless he first sinks thousands of dollars and more time than he spent on the board itself into regulatory paperwork. That's the reason it's on IndieGoGo at all; He needed a USA resident to both handle the financing and get the board produced all within the USA. IndieGoGo was the least bad financing option he found.

[imrehg]

Interesting, do you have any pointers for me regarding these laws? I know that it's a very complex (and complicated, and misunderstood) area of making things. Would expect that such things would bite e.g. sellers on Tindie very soon too. I'm also an EU citizen, though living in Asia, trying to figure out how these rules work for hardware the open source hardware and prototypes I make.