There is something going on the the Bluetooth 4.0 modules.
For a while I designed boards with BLE modules- you only have 2 bad options :
Buy a well known module such as BlueGiga , and pay 10$ (!!) or 7$ for mass production-a real thief.
Buy a version from China like the HM-10, which works great and costs 3$, but you can't really relay on them for a serious company in mass production, also their AT commands are such a disaster .
The only option left, is to embedded a chip CC2541 -the one everybody use- into your pcb with a little antenna on the pcb.
The problem is, nobody (maybe for a reason) share/ do that, and you can't really find makers circuits of this chip with the right components and antenna , also you probably need some code for the 8051 (? )
What you can really do here? why a chip that costs 1$, and needs only a few capacitors, costs 10$ in a module ?? FCC costs that much ?
Yes FCC for an intentional emitter costs about $1500 and takes about 6 months to a year. Then there is the test house fee.
Making your own transmitter is just not cost effective unless you sell thousands.
There is something here that I don't get , how can you put a BLE module that costs 10$( in mass production), in a product that will probably costs 30-50$ like most of the simple gadgets today ?
The BLE takes third of your product's price, not including other parts and PCB, plastic,packing,etc.
Something is missing, there is no chance these companies, pay 10$ out of every 50$ for a single part, you can't make any profitable business like that.
Are there other BLE modules in a reasonable price, or just using a China version ?
Are they get a very special price that I can't see on Farnel and Mouser ?
There is something here that I don't get , how can you put a BLE module that costs 10$( in mass production),
Because it probably cost a lot less than $10.
Are they get a very special price that I can't see on Farnel and Mouser ?
You don't get your parts from them if you mass produce something. You can move the decimal point one or two places to the left on their prices to get distributor prices and then another one for factory prices.
I worked for a maker of set top boxes, wee sold stuff in the millions. Then I worked for a security firm making just thousands of of systems. The difference in component costing was staggering.
The other thing is that sometimes you get end of line parts, where the contract has finished and some on is left with a few thousand parts. These find their way into the market at very cheap prices, but these prices are not sustainable over the long term. These are things you sometimes see on eBay from the far east.
Just remember that virtually all ICs cost the same to manufacturer, there are yield issues with some of the more complex devices but generally the price of something has little or no correlation with what it cost to make but what they can get away with selling it for.