Good evening ladies and gentlemen,
I am ramping up to start my first Arduino project. I have, over the past year and a half been working on putting after-market flashing hazard lights in my car (more to teach myself about soldering and wiring, but also to have when it is raining) and I finally finished them tonight. For my next project I am looking at installing several strips of red LED lights around the floorboards of the driver and passenger seat of my car, to give my sport edition sedan a bit of mood lighting and a sporty, racing vibe. My hazard lights are controlled via a control box that came with one of the sets of flashing lights, but I want my floor lights to be operated by a button on a joystick. My plan is to replace my gearstick knob with the joystick so I can have easy access to the floor lights and maybe even rewire the hazard lights to it as well (but we'll see about that. Baby steps). I figured this would be a good project to learn about Arduinos as well, thus, here I am. Because I am a bit particular about my car being clean, I want to use and pretty small Arduino that I can hide somewhere, but I am usually quite creative with concealment. I suppose the main questions I have are as follows:
Is this project even possible?
What's the cheapest and/or smallest Arduino I could use to light about 8 strips of 30cm red LEDs (about 120 LEDs total)? And if I wired my hazard lights to it as well (120+148=268 LEDs total) does that change what Arduino I can use?
Is there anything I would need other than soldering/wiring stuff, LED light strips, the Arduino, the joystick, and a power supply?
And any other tips/tricks are very welcome.
Thank you very much for your time and input. Have a wonderful day.
What is you electrical and programming ability?
All of this is possible, it just depends on your ability.
Weedpharma
Hi,
Do you supply welders goggles when you turn it all on?
As weedpharma has said it is possible, however I have problems with concealed electronics in cars.
Place it in a good metal enclosure and place it where you can get to it and air can flow around.
If you look at how the main control units in your car are made and mounted, mechanical stability and ventilation should be considered.
In fact put flashing lights on it as well to disguise it.
Tom..... 
Programming should not be a problem at all. I am a junior Computer Science student with 3 programming classes under my belt, and while most of them were mainly in Java and JavaScript, I can easily pick up C for this project.
My electrical expertise is a bit lacking. However, I have been watching YouTube videos on Arduinos and circuits for several hours now and I think I a starting to get the gist.
As far as mounting the electronics goes, I will keep ventilation and stability in mind, but the project is still in its infancy and I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Thanks for the heads-up!
And no welding goggles needed haha, the 148 hazard LEDs are in 6 groups of 22 and 4 groups of 4, all of which are placed throughout the vehicle. the 120 floor LEDs are just the cheap kind that come in 30cm strips, so they're not that bright.
So I got my joystick in today and it has a total of 11 buttons. And I would like each of them to do something different. One can be an on/off switch for one set of lights and another for the other set. one to change the flashing mode on the hazards, and so on. From what I can tell, the buttons are all wired in a series with an output wire from each that sends the signal whenever the series is broken when a button is pressed. I assume now that my next step is to get a breadboard and an arduino and start monkeying with the signals.
What would be a good arduino for a project of this size? 11 or so inputs, at least 3 outputs, and some fairly simply LED flashing code is really all that I can think that it would need to handle.