I found a very nice looking old briefcase at a thrift store today. I’ve decided to turn it into a boombox briefcase with an LED equalizer display as well as a pair of galvos and other assorted bells and whistles. So far I’ve built some boards,  CNC’d the briefcase, and started placing components.

The system is going to run off 12v because that’s the most common for stereo amp boards.

There are fourteen equalizer boards split into left and right. Each bar has seventeen stages. Each stage is made up of three 5mm 3v 20mA frosted white LEDs in series. LED bars are driven by WS2803 chips on some boards I’ve cut  and mounted at 90 degree angles. Audio processing will be done by a pair of MSGEQ7 chips. A PIC18F2620 reads their values through its ADC and controls the WS2803s through SPI.