Phew, I've just finished a ton of work on this project.

First-my board had errors. There was an output jumper connected to the bypass pin of one of the LM386s instead of the output-d'oh! Also, the input cable broke. I threaded it through a mounting hole for some more strain relief this time.

Next-cutting materials. I cut a piece of particle board and a frosted acrylic panel to mount the project on. The lights were hot glued to the particle board, and I'll use some nylon screws, spacers, and nuts to mount the acrylic away from the board so it can diffuse the light from the Christmas lights. After gluing this, I had to solder the huge wire harness up to a connector to attach to my driver board. Quite annoying-the long loopy wires tend to flap all over the place. It also took up a ton of red hookup wire-I'll have to get some more soon.

I also have had to shoot a presentation video over the past few days for my school. (Due to privacy concerns, I won't be posting it here.) It's "only" 15 minutes (my school wants a 5 minute video). Oh well. Also, my video editor (being a bit on the older side) runs kind of slow, enjoys crashing, and takes forever to render. The final video (MP4, 1080p) only renders 2-3 frames per second, making for a close to 3 hour render time. Ouch. I'll probably have to render this overnight, which adds another problem: my computer has a quite inefficient CPU cooler and is thus quite noisy. Hopefully I can get some sleep tonight.