I used the new manual today to make my first dongle, and it really helped. I only had 2 problems. Not being all that knowledgeable about electronics, I wasn't sure if the 1uf capacitors had to be installed a certain way as the other one did, so I did some google searches to learn a little more about them and figured out those didn't matter.
My second problem had to do with installing the octocoupler chip. The one I got didn't have a notch and only had a little dot where pin 1 is, so had to guess that pin 1 should go toward the end with the notch on the socket.
It seems to work, although windows assigned it to com3, which was the same port my d-light dongle was already on, so changed that and it seems to play nice. Now need to get the Smart String controllers, then I guess I'll have to reprogram the PIC when RJ releases the new firmware for his pixelnet.