The company looks a little sketchy, but if it is legit, $5 for a bluetooth module is pretty nice. The packaging is pretty tough to deal with (BGA, but not too many pins, and a big space around them), so maybe SparkFun would like to make a little adaptor board?
but are a bit expensive (they are both using sockets).
I’d suggest you buy a bunch of the modules, design a board that just has .1 pin headers for us to connect to, solder on the modules and sell them to us for cheap. =)
Surplus is always a little interesting. I’ll see if we can get a few - I love the idea. BGA could be a bit tricky.
The datasheet is a bit dense - are you sure the interface is adequate? It seems like the unit requires the external controller to handle most of the stack.
Here’s another alternative for a slightly cheaper bluetooth module. In fact we’re using a few of them in our senior project at school. We paid $300 for 5 of them shipped from Germany. If you guys buy in bulk you may be able to get better pricing, and better shipping. We paid like $80 alone in shipping. But anyway, they are easy to use.
For our project we use them to communicate between a computer and a pic to control household appliances (lights, doorlocks, etc) Just thought I would let you know about them, they use the National LMX9820 bluetooth chip. They have a number of different connection types, we use the ‘transparent’ type, they just spit out whatever they see on their UART lines.
Well enough of me just blabbing on, here’s the website, warning it is in German so you need to use babelfish to translate.