I made 2 of these because when I ordered the PCB and panel from Pusherman, I ended up with 2 panels. One had a scratch on it and they sent me another one and told me to keep the scratched one. When I ordered the parts, I made sure to get two of everything and ordered a second PCB (from Pusherman,of course).
This was my first venture into SMD (aside from soldering an FV-1 in a couple of guitar pedals) but I found it to be pretty straightforward. No doubt the 0805 sized parts helped. I tried experimenting with solder paste, but found that I could do it with my iron and some thin solder
I ordered a selection of SMD resistors and capacitors from Tayda and any odball values they didn't have, I ordered in small quantities from ebay.
The only expensive (and hard to source) part is the DAC8565IAPW high quality digital to analog converter. Thankfully, Texas Instruments will sell these direct (even in ones and twos) and I ended up doing just that. £10 each plus £5 shipping to Scotland.
There is a note on the Ornament & Crime site about some faffing around required to mount the display and get it sitting right. I ended up cutting an IC socket in half to get a nice low-profile socket for the display pins. Works quite well.
Both modules fired up and worked first time, but I ran into problems on both with outputs not responding during the calibration routine. On the first one, I really made a hash of it, but eventually got it working. Documented in this reddit post.
The second one had the same problem, but was trivial to solve after the adventures with module 1.
Worth noting - on module 1 , the problem was a DAC pin that was not soldered - fixed by reflowing. On module 2, the problem was a short between two DAC pins - spotted with a magnifiying glass and fixed by removing the solder with some flux and a braid.
These are great modules and well worth the adventure of building them.