Of course I am sure I am forgetting obvious things, so any response welcome. But here it is: a quick guide to some Best Practices in Arduino project construction.
Good thinking. I do mention power, as you will have seen, as in the need to make sure your supply can handle the load - but not in any great detail. I can add more!
Yes, I use nothing but silicone wire (and for others: yes, the manual does recommend it).
If these notes are useful, I would be happy if they were more widely shared. I hear from others that this kind of instruction is missing fore new constructors.
You are right about the heat shrink, that's definitely an option. Since I have no hairdryer I tend to use the iron (not touching!) near the contacts, and tie-wraps for the rest. And this gives me more flexibility: first I cut to length, and then connect, the wires, then I tie them together.
In a distant past they taught me to use waxed wire to tie cables. I was a telecoms engineer and commissioned huge phone switches worldwide. Today, I am not even sure where to get this waxed wire...
As a manufacturing engineer, it is important that your design be modular - that is, each panel and the chassis needs to be separable to allow clean assembly and then each panel can be built, wired, and stocked.
Sure hard point to point wirings works and is easy to fab -- if you're only building one. But if you hope to sell your design, you need to design for manufacturability. Much of what is shown here is "hobbist level" -- Good, solid fab, but without an eye to making more than ONE
Making each wire individually takes time and therefore costs $$$. Using premade wires is ultimately more reliable and cheaper than hand rolling your own. In the real world, for low volume production, it is almost always better, cheaper, faster, to buy rather than build.
Was the cost of the wire $37 per roll for each color? If so, the full 10 resistor colors (most of which you seem to have used) run you 10x that, or $370! You can buy a lot of premade duponts for that!
All of the issues of wire type, crimping, crimp tools, labor, time, part inventory, etc., all vanish if you buy rather than build.
If one wants to learn STEM, they need to learn how to make a product, not just a project.
Indeed: of course this is not for production: the limiting factor is things like connectors. These are expensive, need special tools, and preclude things like the strip board used here. All this drives up the cost and production time.
If you have any product suggestions for these, though, they are welcome.
Production level needs a custom circuit board, not stripboard. I rather think of this as prototype level -- but most people here are indeed hobbyists, and I don't think that's a bad thing.
And yes, as an engineer I know something about STEM!