Ok, I've done a bit more research, and here's where i'm at:
In regards to RoHS compliance, the easiest way to ensure this seems to be to get the boards assembled by a 3rd party who can then certify it as such (It would also save me a lot of time with a soldering iron). A quick check of online companies gave me a cost of about £1- £2 a board to get them assembled, which isn't too bad.
The main downside of this is that I would have to get a bulk order of boards made, say 500 or so, which could cost me up to around £2000 on just parts and manufacture. I would make that back by selling them, but I would need that money up front to get them made. One thing I've been looking at to solve this is running a kickstarter on it, which would have the added bonus of gauging whether there's a market for these things outside of robot wars; If it doesn't reach it's funding target then there's probably not enough demand to justify it anyway.
As for CE markings, I've been looking through the official directive (
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/Lex ... 019:en:PDF ) and it says that you only need to affix the CE mark to your product to be able to sell it on the EU market ( Article 8 ). You don't need to produce evidence of conformity unless you are challenged about it. On such a small scale product, which is likely to conform anyway and is only going to be sold in the UK, I feel it is very unlikely. If it is challenged, you have to either run the tests to prove it's conformity or remove it from the market, neither of which are particularly harsh penalties given the probability of it happening. If for whatever reason it turns out I do actually need certification before they go to market, I'll add the cost of it to the kickstarter. CE markings seem mainly to be only checked on exported goods ("Non-compliant products are at risk of being recalled or stopped at customs") so as long as they're not exported I think it should be a fairly unlikely to be challenged.
For the moment, I'm going to sell a hand assembled run of prototypes straight to you guys, to check their reliability and that it's actually worth selling them on the open market. If they pass this, I'll start getting these things sorted for the open market. One of the reasons I'm looking into this is that Will wants to use them in his robot kits, which are sold on the open market, which (I think) would require CE marked components. The other reason is it's some what of an experiment to see if it is possible to legally sell stuff on the open market without ridiculous start up costs, as I would quite like to sell other miniature circuits eventually.
(Source:
http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies ... m?filter=6 )
EDIT: Hmm, looking through some of the other directives that i'd missed first time round (namely the RoHS and EMC ones)... looking slightly less promising, but I'm still determined to work something out :L