Looking at their project page, it really seemed like they had a prototype. They had lots of pictures taken with their "really fast" prototype. Which was presumably actually an updated V1 unit, and not actually a prototype of the new one at all. This puts them in a nasty position legally. They claimed to have a functional prototype. They appeared to be displaying an actual cased prototype. They gave every indication of being further on than they really were.

I'm pretty certain that their budget is well-costed, because they know up-front the cost of flights, accommodation, venue hire etc etc etc. No design, no R&D, no prototyping, no retooling. The costs are easily identified and easily audited. You, perhaps, are the one who is missing the point.

The open sourcing was part of the original deal anyway, I believe.

Silicone molds can be cast on 3D prints. It's a very rough-and-ready way to go about manufacture, but it gets the job done.

Given the poor rate of success of Kickstarter projects, you'd be surprised how much of a loss you'd make at a slightly lower price...

Which would be freakier -- seeing Jesus's face appearing from beneath your melting butter, or a simulacrum of the red face from Mars when you spread out your jam?

Except that a Kickstarter project is a contract between a business and private individuals. Consumer law trumps contract law every time, because even if the contract doesn't state "your statutory rights are not affected", you're statutory rights are not affected -- there are very few situations where a private individual can sign away statutory rights, and in such conditions, you really have to be very explicit about what rights are being signed away.

Kickstarter's boldest of bold text is the statement that the project once funded is obliged to deliver. That, I would argue (IANAL), makes it a contract of sale and subject to commercial law. Right after that sentence it goes on to enumerate remedies if a project can't complete, but by that point, the die is already cast. This hasn't been tested in the courts yet, perhaps because of low levels of loss, but this project has just lost $400K, and the company is still solvent, so there is the real possibility that this could be the first test-case.

They took a straightforward device and decided to make it more complicated. It was not the same product. Triggertrap 1 was a hacked together Arduino device -- the Ada was proper engineering, and there's a major difference there...

But in Kickstarter's case, you never win anything more than you put in -- if on every gamble you either lose or break even, in the long run, you lose.

If it's easy, it should already be in the prototype. You shouldn't need to pick a module after the Kickstarter offering.

Uber claims not to be a taxi company. Unfortunately for companies, the law doesn't always let them choose which laws apply to them.

Governments give citizens the illusion of control so that we don't exercise very real control that we do actually have. But sometimes, we break the fourth wall. Need I mention Syriza...?

I don't think they've got a leg to stand on. (IANAL, although I did a course on human anatomy at university, so I know what legs look like.) First up, you don't need to include the term "your statutory rights are not affected" for your statutory rights not to be affected. This is a business-to-consumer relationship, so all consumer law still applies. Secondly, the wording of that agreement is tremendously vague. "used funds appropriately" -- just what is the legal definition of "appropriately"? I mean, it's clear that buying a Ferrari would be inappropriate, and it's clear that buying the PCBs would be appropriate, but the line between is so fuzzy as to bring us right back to "statutory rights". Now these guys have admitted to: A) failing to engage a suitably experienced project manager and B) commissioning code for a component that they could never afford to use. They failed to do the most basic of due diligence, and thus frittered away other people's money... inappropriately. And now they appear to be writing off the cost of their failure to follow basic good management practice out of other people's money, rather than carrying the costs of their own mistakes.

Exactly. There pitch was: "we had an idea for a straightforward product. It worked. Now we want to do something several orders of magnitude more complicated, and we know we can do it, because we did something much, much simpler before."

Yes figuratively. Now she literally shouts down the stairs.