Bah!
Kicking into tech projects is always dodgy. Most of the ones I've looked at have had "pie in sky" writ large in the description.
Even if the concept is seemingly watertight, tech has a way of seducing would-be designers into making grandiose claims they haven't actually tried to implement or into "improving" the product as part of the initial build.
Hence the Peachy Printer - an intriguing idea for a 3D printer (a really basic one; comparing it to even a mediocre commercially available printer is akin to comparing a Pi to a full-sized mini tower but we knew that going in - or should have done) . It is still in development over a year later than anticipated due to tech improvement creep.
Will I be crushed if I don't see my $100 pay off? Yeah, sorta. Will I be surprised? Only a little. As soon as they started telling us they were changing the design (for the best of reasons) I knew they had gone seriously off the rails. When kickstarted projects go into R&D post-funding it is a bad sign.
Tech isn't the only product class that suffers from over-claiming and under-delivering. Look at the mess Chaosium has gotten into with their stupidly over-funded Call of Cthulhu rewrite. And they *know* about publishing stuff.
It is hard sometimes to sort out the sudden onrush of incompetence from the sudden de-cloaking of a bad actor prior to his heading for the Neutral Zone, but I have to say that the overblown claims for the Zano Drone had to be ringing alarm bells in any real engineer's head long ago.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
