I am looking to do something like this as a Christmas gift for my son. However, this looks pretty labor-intensive (300 bodge wires!).
I have dabbled with arduino in the past but I am no expert with hardware.
Does anyone have suggestions of cool projects similar to this? Toy-like LED things :)
Or even a website I could browse to find similar projects (like Instructables maybe)?
Strings or panels of addressible LEDs would be a good place to start. Adafruit brands these as "neopixels" but the specific LED most of them use is a "WS2812", "WS2812B", or "WS2813".
With these you have a single data line from a microcontroller to control the LEDs, and there are libraries to help you do that.
I've lit some up and fiddled with them and they're pretty cool, but I haven't come up with anything more serious to use them on yet. RGB lights on stuff for the sake of it isn't my aesthetic. But maybe a clock and weather forecast station with animated rain effects or something.
Lots of info here: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-neopixel-uberguide
https://www.learnrobotics.org/blog/neopixel-projects-ridicul...