Good news is that my parting of ways with Arduino seems to be going well. AVR seems to go right back to native C.

My career seems to be keeping me busy upwards of 7 days a week currently. Unfortunately, this has put Ambuino on the backburner temporarily. However, this does provide additional funding for improvement designs!

I am still debating which would be better: External filtering (MSGEQ7), or Fast Fourier Transforms. FFTs have a slight learning curve, but result in reduced hardware requirements. In addition, it is still faster with analysis than reading from an MSGEQ7.

My hope is to have another working (DIP and Through-hole) prototype done by the end of August. After that, we'll look at size reduction.