Custom game cabinet lighting and fan control feasibility.

Projects General Guidance
1

First off I am new to Arduino, I have a couple friends that have tinkered with them they have shown me some of the basics of it and that is about as far as I have gotten myself.

I am in the process of building a small custom cabinet for housing my video game collection and I had the thought that it would be cool if I could do some customizable back-lighting and cooling fans.

So here is the idea. There are six sections to the lower cabinet that will house the systems themselves. I would like each one of those six sections to have back lighting and a cooling fan. I would like to be able to turn either all the lighting on together or any of them independently. I also would like to be able to turn on the cooling fan for the compartment for whatever system is in use. I am thinking perhaps using something similar to a basic computer cooling fan.

In addition to the six compartments on the lower section of the cabinet. There are six compartments to the upper section. These compartments will be used to house controllers and accessories. While the lower compartments will be open, the upper compartments will have doors with frosted glass. I would like those upper compartments to have back lighting as well that will shine through the glass which will have custom game icons/logos in the frosted glass. The upper compartments do not need to be lit separately, they can all be lit simultaneously.

So what I am dealing with are 7 independent lighting circuits and 6 different cooling fan circuits. I would also need a way to select what is on at what times whether through a switch/button array of some sort or perhaps some slicker method that I have yet to dream up.

I have plenty of experience with electronics and such. I have built wiring harnesses for race cars and installed stand alone engine management systems. So I also have experience setting up sensors, switches, relays, etc. I have been looking through the different products available and trying to figure out some of the following.

  1. Is the project feasible with the way I have thought it up?
  2. If so, which Arduino product would handle my needs?
  3. Can you run fans directly off an output or do I need to set up relays to control the fans and switch the relays on/off with the board
  4. Any thoughts on a better way to control the system besides a switch/button array?

Any help here is very much appreciated! Also, attached is a picture of the cabinet build in progress. Still need to build the doors, do some iron on detailing on the unfinished edges, and stain.

emp_2.jpg
emp_2.jpg1836×2448 339 KB

2

As i see it you will need 13 power outputs for the lightning and the fans. These cannot be driven directly by the arduino so you will have to use relays or transistors to control power on/off. If you want dimmable lightning this can be done as well but the solution gets more complex.
There are plenty of pins left so you can wire these to switches giving you input values to act upon.

3

You can get individually addressable multi-color LED strips like the one below, that would be neat for this kind of project. You could put a section in each box and link them with wires. Then you only need 5 wires total for lighting control (+,-,R,G,B).