One Arduino - two projects?

Projects General Guidance
1

Hi, I just received my first Arduino (a Mega 2560 r3). First time I have ever done anything remotely like this, lots of reading to do! :fearful:

I intend to run a quite simple project for LED sync with music http://www.audectra.com/guides/easy-diy-audectra-setup/ Not much can go wrong there and it's pretty much a copy and paste exercise. Useful introduction for me though.

I would also like to build a soil moisture project like this one, perhaps adding self irrigation openhomeautomation.net

My question is, can I do this with just the one Arduino? My Audectra project will only run when I am playing Music/Games on my PC i.e. not 24/7. It would be fine to also not have the soil moisture project not active whilst I am using the Audectra project. So it is not like both things would need to run together if that is a fundamental problem. But I would need some easy way of switching between the two.

Apologies if I have made any basic errors here; I did try to search for an answer first and everyone has to start somewhere ...

2

A single sketch can control multiple things independently and it might well be possible to combine both those projects into a single sketch, but I suspect each project will need its own hardware and you'll hardly want to go disconnecting and reconnecting things every time you turn something else on. Once you have the prototype working using official boards and shields, and if you want to keep the project running longer term, consider moving your projects to less expensive Arduino clones.

3

I recommend an arduino nano clone. On ebay it's less than 10 USD and has everything you need in a small package. You can use it to run the LED strip, no need for arduino mega.