building a very simple LE bluetooth peripheral

Question

For educational and nerdy reasons, I am trying to build a very simple Bluetooth LE peripheral for an iPhone 4S using CoreBluetooth. For the peripheral itself, where can a get a cheap $10-$25 bluetooth chip to toy with? Google and Apple both only lead me to chips $100-$150. All the peripheral has to do is transmit a "0" upon a button press to a nearby iPhone.

Answer 1

The BLE chips are cheap. For example, the TI CC2540 costs about $2, and you can get a few free sample chips to play with. http://www.ti.com/product/cc2540#samplebuy

For $99 you get an easy to use development kit. The problem with the $2 solution is that you have to rig up your own development board.