Another thing, do you have a team behind you (does project go on if something bad happens to yourself)? It sounds like you are solely doing everything on your own. Reason I'm asking is because as you mentioned, the initial investment is huge. Worst case scenario, lets say something happened to you and you are no longer able to continue, does the project stop? People would be stuck with very expensive hardware...
Many people can do such firmware, including me. It's not a problem. This product has amazing characteristics, and it needs to be realized. Also if you have such boards, you can try to run Equihash or Monero in parallel with SHA3 algorithms.