Today I successfully completed by first reflow soldering attempt using a heat gun.  My first try was with a junk SOIC chip on an extra board I had lying around... it worked perfectly the first time (I ended up with a bit of a solder bridge between two pins, but that easily cleaned up).  I cannot test this chip to verify that it works, but I did continuity checks on all the pins and that worked fine:

My second attempt was with a HC-05 (or possibly HC-06... my particular boards have characteristics of both of these boards), trying to solder it to a simple breakout which I designed.  This breakout has the same pinout as the Sparkfun XBee breakout, which means that I can use it interchangeably with Stubby to allow it to be controlled by the computer.  (This board has quite large pads, and I could have easily soldered it by hand using an iron, but I wanted to practice my reflow technique).  This time I was able to actually verify that the circuit worked, by hooking it up to my FTDI cable (via a level adaptor).  Sure enough, it works great:

Tomorrow I am expecting to get a bunch of parts from Digikey, which will give me plenty of more practice with reflow soldering, including a nice fine pitched TQFP-32 package.

(This post is not directly related to Stubby, as reflow soldering is not required to build the control board.  However, I get to show off my newest skill, and the end result is that I now have a Bluetooth breakout for Stubby, so I figure it qualifies for this project.)

Cheers