This is where kickstarter is most useful in my opinion: where you have a production-ready product, and you're not sure whether you should start at your local machine shop, or get in touch with a factory in China to produce the product.

I'm aware of someone working on prototyping a somewhat niche piece of consumer electronics (a shot timer for competitive shooting). The products on the market now are expensive and kind of suck.

He seems to have the development chops to come up with something viable, and adding things like real data logging and bluetooth connectivity would actually make it better than anything on the market right now.

He's mentioned that he's doing it essentially as a hobbyist project, and that things like regulatory compliance testing and funding an initial production run would be something out of reach normally.

Kickstarter seems great for this kind of project. It lets you target an interested audience to get the initial capital funding to produce a product that you might not ever get off the ground beyond the personal prototype stage.