I'm not a big fan of Kicad but the main reason I used it was so that anyone could edit and work with the files without having to buy a license of any sort.  So I'm not really looking for a commercial version of Eagle. You have to remember that where I live I could have easily picked up Altium or Eagle for only a few $. Using Kicad was more a philosophical issue. Despite the troubles I had on the way I'm actually kind of impressed that it actually does work. I would change a bunch of things if I had the time and energy to contribute or fork the project - but I don't for now.

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Tonight I've been working on the cgminer driver. It was a bit tough at first seeing how it worked but I've finally figured it out I think and made some headway. I'm hoping that tomorrow I can get an initial version running for testing, and then I'll improve it as I can.

One thing I'm still not sure about is whether it should (or has to) show every slave as an individual device line (like a GPU) on the screen or whether it can consolidate them into one total per USB port. Personally I'd prefer it as an option but I'm not even sure that is possible.

And I still have to work out where it gets the cfg for each device. Presumably that is stored in the conf file like with GPU devices but I haven't quite sorted that out yet. Each device has a default config built in but I'd like user settings to be restored from the conf file upon start up, and I didn't see that in the driver code for bflsc.

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My current opinion / standing on the over-clocking power issues is that I'll get the current version working fully and then do a version 2 board that uses the IR3847 buck reg chip instead. The circuit is almost identical and just has some position/orientation changes. The sourcing may be more difficult but it's still the better choice for boosting the on-board power without too much redesign. Most of the parts are value changes to similar parts. I think the main issue will be the Cyntec 0.215 uH inductor (PCDC1008-R215EMO) and for those looking at sourcing and supply I'd start digging into how to get test samples and place larger orders of that part. It doesn't seem to be commonly available at Mouser/Digikey et al.

Just some forward looking comments at this point.

On the K1 it's possible to replace the 6502A with the 6503A and use a powered hub to get up to 3A of juice for the ASIC over-clocking. It's almost the same price anyway but would require a small bump in inductor choice.