The Arduino that drives the blinky coats’ LED strands needs a nice place to live. I decided on small polycarbonate boxes made by Pelican for cell phones, MP3 players, and other small devices.

The box comes with a very nice gasket/pad that’s formed to the bottom of the clamshell. Great, but takes too much space, so I cut it out, keeping the sealing gasket (the case won’t be weatherproof anyway because the 2 knob posts will not be well sealed, but it will keep most of the dust out). Here’s the layout, with wire snaps that will serve as a 5v GND power bus, the rotary selector with nifty LED dial, potentiometer knob, and voltmeter LED laid out was they will be.

Components from SparkFun and Adafruit, the ArduinoMega is from ElecFreaks.

A key part of the design is getting cables in and out of the enclosure. I’m using a small cable gland through which  our cables from the coat will come through (power: +12v/GND; 3 leads from strands; 2 leads from fabric switch). I’ve desoldered the power jack from the Arduino, we’ll solder new power cables (8.4v from the battery) directly to the board, but the jack is too big.

Next up: two more power buses for the strands, then building all the enclosures and wiring it up. If only I’d made more progress on the software…