I'm very suprised I've not seen any chatter about this on here - perhaps the person behind it is persona-non-grata (Arduino politics gets confusing sometimes!).
Anyway, I just saw something on twitter about this:
Basically, there's various levels of Leondardo clone-based kits - for example, it claims that for the $29 pack you get $85-$112 worth of kit. There's also a "perk" of 5 Leonardo-style boards for $50, although nothing gets delivered 'til spring 2014.
Looks interesting; the first thing that bothers me is the import duty (which kicks in at items over £15 imported into the UK).
Going to have to figure out how much it would be if I get "intercepted".
As it all seems to end in about 30 hours (from now), and there seems to be a fair amount to read, has anyone else formed any opinions on these packs?
I bought one of the "Borderless Electronics" Leonardo clones via their original kickstarter, because I didn't have a 32u4 based board, didn't want to spend a lot on it, and didn't really care how long it took to arrive, and desired the "exact leonardo clone." (Mostly, I want it to debug other peoples' problems.)
It seems to work fine so far.
OTOH BE seems to be pushing the limits of what I consider "reasonable" use of crowdsourcing, and I don't particularly believe their claims of charitable intent. Other vendors are selling similar boards at similar prices ( http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/seeeduino-lite-p-1487.html?cPath=6_7 ), with more value-add, shorter delivery times, and more traditional business models.
On the third hand, I don't actually see anything WRONG with running a pre-pay and long lead-time business model to reduce costs. It just feels a bit weird. It'll be interesting to see if BE manages to continue to make this work.