The BP V5 is only $42.50 and is still the most popular model, and is actively developed and supported. The BP6 has some fancier features that make it more expensive, but the Bus Pirate folks are very price sensitive and want to keep the tool as accessible as possible. (source: I'm a distributor for them).
Very close. It's somewhat of an OpenSCAD or Processing for electrically simple circuit board design, that uses KiCad as the generating kernel. Artistic projects are the easiest to demonstrate, however we also use it for industrial applications where we need many similar variants of simple boards. You can also use its output alongside normally routed parts to automate the tedious portions of a design: https://social.v.st/@th/111646753350070002
Author here- That is a fun workflow! One of the things we've been prototyping is a web frontend powered by circuitpainter, where you can use a mouse or pen to draw freehand traces that can be rendered as 'real' KiCad traces so that DRC can work. However, since we also have the path information, it's possible to do things such as automatically place components along the paths, which would be extremely tedious to do by hand or with existing CAD tools.
CircuitPainter came out of an effort to automate the production of large numbers of very slightly different LED boards for sculptural work, where it was worth the effort to write code to generate the boards. I used KiCad as the backend specifically so that we could use our known footprints/solderpaste masks and get a DRC pass.
It uses KiCad as a backend, so you are able to take advantage of the design rule checker and other niceties that come from the traditional CAD world. We've been using it successfully to automate very repetitive design jobs at our studio.
It's definitely the same folks (I know them). Ian's been posting about the project on the dangerous prototype twitter account here: https://twitter.com/dangerousproto/
There's a large coffee chain in Guangzhou called '猫屎咖啡', which literally translates to 'cat shit coffee': http://www.kafelaku.com.cn/
They offer Kopi luwak coffee as a specialty, which is supposed to be collected from the feces of Civets that ate coffee cherries, so the name is accurate but still more direct than I would have expected.
It might be helpful to look at this as a percentage change- it looks like they were currently charging $42.18/year as the standard price (1), so this is a 30% price increase.