You'd have to work very hard to damage the Arduino, assuming you don't apply any extra power to it somewhere. Good luck with the experimentation, and if you have any questions about the hardware or software, don't hesitate to ask.

Can't wait to see it when its done! I took my underglow kit for my car and rigged it in my room once, never had any parties with it though

I've already made a program that will fade through the colors with the one RGB light that came with the kit. Not too hard, but it looks cool. Have to do some more expiramentation.

I hope you get those lights from dx sooner then later to they sometimes take forever to ship lol. And have fun with this! I have been wanting to set somethign like partymode up. But i want to run something like These around the top of my room for mood/task lighting as well as good music lighting!

I'm still wondering how to power it, I think you can use the USB cable into one of the adapters and plug it in. There is also the DC input thingy on it...

Also wondering about speakers.

The arduino can remain powered by use. The lights should have an external power unit. Else you will overdrawn on the arduino and may break it!! Usb only puts out a max of 500ma that's like 1 and a half of those less at max power so you won't be able to run them well anyway.

In that case, how would you recommend powering the lights?

The worst you could do is break the polyfuse on the Arduino or the USB port. If you use a nice addressable LED strip, you can just power that with a separate 5v source. If you're just driving one of those LED strips without built-in drivers, you'll need some drivers or some MOSFETS. Individual LEDs shouldn't need a external power source.

Assuming that I'm going to use the breadboard, how would I hook up the input for music?

Well, I have had a little bit of inspiration. I could use like a pair of old headphones, and cut the cord near the end. The challenging thing now is to hook it to the arduino. I assume that there are 2 wires going to each speaker, power and ground. I thought about using one side of the headphones for the speaker, and one for the arduino FFT processing, but then I realized that there is a Right/Left thing going on. Please help.

The three wires are ground, left, and right; in other words, there is a common ground. You'll want to connect the ground to the Arduino's ground, and use the circuit I showed you (did I post it here?) to connect the left and right signals to two of the Arduino's analog input pins. For my own version of PartyMode, I have one of the two headphone outputs on my computer connected to the Atmega chip, and my speakers are connected to the Line Out port.

I don't believe you posted the circuit here, Also, I figured you would use the Analog in ports. Would I just use the other ports for output of sound?

Also, I was wondering If it would be a problem if there were multiple formats of music being played. I think that it wouldn't mater that much because the sound Is just a pure output and the different formats of music are already being computed by the device.

Something like this should do the trick for the circuit. It first removes any DC bias with the large capacitor, then uses the resistors to bias the signal back to 0-5V, centered at 2.5V. You can even omit the 10K potentiometer and the 4.7nF capacitor if you want. And no, it doesn't matter what's producing the sound.

I got the cords hooked up to the Arduino, and I could even add the other stuff because it came in a kit

I just can't figure out how to do the FFT. I have the cords in A0, and A1, and the ground. I tried a direct output from the Arduino through a port, but it didn't do much.

I've actually just been writing the code for my own Arduino and PartyMode 2.0, so I'd be happy to share the schematics and code when I finish. You can see the (more or less) current state of the software test in this topic:

http://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=215399#215399

Is this project still active? You should check this out:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pavantumati/13041560973/

Yes.

I was able to look at the code that Kerm sent me. I have had a little progress this weekend.

Pics coming later today hopefully.

@Kerm
would you be able to draw me out a program map of what Party Moduino is doing? I've figured out kind of what's going on.


Edit: here is a pic of the hardware side
Edit2: labled pic