Ghostbusters proton pack lights assistance

Projects General Guidance
1

I'm building a 3d printed Ghostbusters proton pack, and after doing a bunch of research on different ways to add lighting/sound, I came across Arduino as a cost efficient way to do so.

I also ran across several other people's code/attempts and one that specifically caught my attention was one that used a Arduino Nano as a basis.

Now, I will preface this that I have 0 experience with Arduino, and I realize the first thing someone is probably going to tell me is that I should come back when I know more.. Which I don't disagree with, but I find that I learn faster/easier if I'm working on a project I actually want to complete vs. something else.. so here we are. I'm not completely inept when it comes to technology and building things, I'm just not accustomed to the specifics of arduino which is why I'm here.

So basically, what I want to do is this...

The proton pack has the 4 red cyclotron lights, that cycle and the blue power cell bar graph light.

I plan to use 4 Neopixel Jewels for the cyclotron lights, and 2 Neopixel sticks for the power cell.

For the gun, there is a smaller bar graph, and several smaller single LED's that blink or stay on, and a light in the gun barrell that would simulate the "firing" function.

I plan to use another Jewel for the barrel light, and single flora neopixels for the other lights, and another neopixel stick for the bar graph (this is the part I'm not entirely sure of)

I want to use an Arduino to control these lights, and pair that with an Adafruit Sound FX board/Amp for sound.

I want to be able to trigger the sounds + the lights for the different functions. There is a user on github who has already written code to do most of this, but I want to change a few things about it.

mostly what is confusing me is the mechanical connections between, the arduino, the sound fx board, the lights, and the switches. I understand that in order to trigger the sounds on the fx board, I basically have to create a circuit, but how do I trigger BOTH the sounds and the lights at the same time with say.. the same switch?

So, yeah.. that's where I'm at. I did a bunch of searches for proton pack builds and I've watched darn near every single arduino proton pack specific video and nearly none of them go into any actual details other than just showing you how it's connected (which does help.)

2

Switch, sound, lights - these are all fully independent. It's the Arduino that glues it all together.

So you toggle a switch, or push a button; the Arduino reads this, and acts upon it in the way you program it. So one switch may start a sound, another may start a light show, yet another does both. Of course different switches can be used to play different sounds, etc.

You can go fancy, and have the behaviour of buttons change with the position of say a rotary switch.

Or add a random function that in 1 out of 100 cases simulates a catastrophic failure (of course you also don't know when that's going to happen - it's random after all) upon pressing the button, instead of firing your gun.

For sound: do look at the DF Player Mini as well. Cheap and works great.

Neopixels are WS2812B LEDs. Those give great visual effects indeed, sounds like a good choice for this project.