Howdy,
After I finished making , I returned to my Arduino mod of the Velleman 3-D Christmas tree kit. I discovered an Adafruit DC Boarduino, which is an ATMega328 Arduino clone, in my stash and decided to switch to it as I wouldn't gain much more compactness by soldering the whole Breaduino circuit onto a perfboard.
I hot glued a perf board to the base of the tree and soldered wires to the transistors bases and also the battery connectors. This reduced a lot of the bulk of the mini-hook jumpers I had been using. I also fully removed the unused resistors (R5, R7, R6, R8) and capacitors (C1, C2, C3, C4). This is the simplified schematic:
On the perf board, I soldered a male 1x4 header for the 2 signal wires (T1/T2 & T3/T4), VCC (9VDC), GND. I then created a cable to connect the header to the Boarduino:
Next holiday season, I think I may try to "dress" it up a bit. Maybe put the Boarduino inside a small gift box and cover up the perf board under the tree with fake snow. But, for now, it's time to think up some new projects for 2012!
Cheers,
Drew