Originally Posted by
ItsJustMe
I don't know what your level of electronics tinkering is, you probably already know thist, but just in case, you are going to need driver transistors, or better yet MOSFETs, to drive more than a couple of LEDs off an Arduino/atmel CPU.
I normally just use the chip itself, not a full arduino board, since I'm going to have to add circuitry anyway and piggybacking a whole arduino, even one of the little ones, just takes up more space when all you need is the chip itself.
using just the chip is a rather common thing I do too but I am friends with the owner of The Makerspace so if I document the build he will probably hook me up with the components and board. Next semester I am taking an embedded systems class and I may go all out building a Cycle-duino and have a few purpose built cycling arduino PCB's made up.