It was fun to put this kit together, although I would not do it again due to the labor involved. I used a very fine-tipped Hakko 30W pencil iron, paste flux and no magnifier.

Thanks to the other comments, it went smoothly for me and was perfect on first power-up.

1) The new crystal does not have a dot but has one pad on the bottom that is differently-shaped than the others. That is pad 1. This was the toughest install for me because there is so little surface exposed at each corner for the iron to touch. I ended up building up a large drop of solder on the tip and touching this to the u-shaped vertical channels at each corner that suck the solder down to the board\'s pads. Sadly I was not tweezing the crystal firmly enough and got it installed a bit crooked.

2) I did not have trouble with the microUSB port. What I did was clamp it in place and solder the pins first, without soldering the shell. I scraped the tip of the iron back and forth across the pins, randomly bridging some of them, until eventually by luck none of them were bridged. Immediately, I stopped scraping and then proceeded to solder down the shell through the board.

3) Thanks to the good close-up photos on the assembly page, I did not have any trouble identifying any of the non-passive parts or determining their alignment.

4) Roger Vernon\'s tip about soldering the OLED screen made it an easy install.

5) Install the components from the inside out so that the components that would be blocked first are installed before the ones that would block them.

6) It was surprising how tiny the screen was and how hard it is to actually read the tiny text. I would build the xminilab instead next time. This is especially true given that one can install either the J8 1x6 OR the PDI 1x6 but not both at the same time on the xprotolab. The xminilab allows for both 1x6 connectors to be installed.

HA! My very first surface mount soldering project and it worked the first time with no reflowing/fixing!!

Thanks to everyone who provided tons of soldering advice. You NEED a fine tip iron, very small gauge solder, fine tweezers, a good clamp to hold the board, good light, and a good large magnifying stand. Oh, and a bucket of flux. Set the iron to 675 degrees F and That\'s it!

The OLED was actually one of the easiest parts to solder. Forget the paperclip advice and use some tape across the ribbon above the pads. I was fumbling with paperclips. Tape is so much easier. Just pre-tin the pads with a small amount of solder, put down a slim layer of paste, sandwich the ribbon on with tape and run your tip down the ribbon pads one at a time. That\'s all I did!