Given the unlikelyhood of a USB boot loader being developed, It seems as though the process is kind of backwards. Seems like SB should tell folks he's shipping the miners as-is unless they insist on waiting.
Just in case anyone out there is still confused about if they should wait for a boot loader - my personal opinion is that it's impossible to fit the bootloader AND the firmware code in the limited PIC16 memory. If you are waiting for a USB bootloader to have your miners shipped, don't. Get them ASAP.
NOTE: as soon as i say "impossible", someone will do it. lol. Lets just say getting all the code to fit in 16k memory is VERY unlikely. As with certain other components in the K16 design, the choice of that specific component (PIC16) may have been ill-advised.
Can I ask how many of you guys agree with this?
I've been holding out for the bootloader but I'm $#@%! tired of waiting on these things to be honest. (my BFL's have been lonely for months...)
The K16 work well enough after some tweaking for the people who have gotten them already?
The K16's I received 'as-is' worked straight out of the box. Of course I had to install cgminer and WinUSB (zadig) first for Windows, but I moved them to linux and there I just compiled cgminer and off they went.
You should *not* wait for the usb bootloader if you won't be flashing the firmware anyway. It works now and any fixes will have a marginal impact on performance. i2c chaining will not work, so you'll need to attach each one with USB instead. Other than that, they're good to go.