Advice & Ideas needed…

Working on a project – a custom wall clock with perler bead NES sprites in the place of the numbers. The figures are mounted to a wood board with cutouts underneath, and during each hour an LED will turn on and light up the NES figure for that hour, and an audio file will play some sound effects/theme music from that particular NES game.

Time, Budget, Experience

• Time is not a factor
• $50 – $100 if possible. I already have a bunch of components (resistors, caps, LEDs, wire, etc.) laying around. I don't have any chips or an arduino.
• I'm an engineer, just not electrical. Mech Eng + lots of math. I did take a couple EE classes in college but that was…a couple…years ago. I'm comfortable with circuits, wiring breadboards, sizing capacitors and resistors, etc. I've built several computers (thanks, Newegg). I'm pretty certian that once pointed in the right direction and with a little advice I can figure it out and build the circuits. My problem is knowing where to start.

Controlling the LED's

My main issue is trying to figure out the best way to sync LED's to a clock. For example, if Mario is at the 3 o'clock spot, then at 3pm the light behind Mario will turn on and stay lit for one hour. Then at 4pm the light behind Mario will turn off and the light behind another figure at the 4 o'clock position (Link) will turn on. The lights will cycle through 12 figures, then restart.

From what I've been researching the last couple weeks, there are lots of options:

• 555 timer (don't thing this will work with time periods required)
• 555 timer with decade counter
• 555 timer, decade counter + 32.768 Hz crystal (can I run a clock off this too?)
• cascading decade counters with 555 timer
• arduino board and write code for program
• raspberrypi (probably overkill)
• others?

Playing Audio

I want to play a short clip of the theme music for each game at the top of each hour. For example, at 4pm when Link lights up, the overworld theme from Legend of Zelda will play for a minute, then stop.

This is where I'm least familiar with my options. I've looked at stuff like:

• WTV020SD with arduino
• taking apart an old mp3 player and setting in to play in a loop
• various audio chips and boards

Battery life will likely be a problem with the mp3 player route. If I go the arduino route I could probably program the LED's and get an mp3/audio board and control that too, right?

TLDR

1. Need to sync 12 LED's to a clock/timer so one LED will stay lit for 1 hour and then turn off for the next 11 hours while the next LED lights up. Repeat.
2. Need to play an audio file once at the beginning of each hour.

I've looked through the googles, here, sparkfun, buildcircuit, instructables, mdfly, and several other sites. Haven't seen anything that addresses this, or if I did I didn't recognize it. My apologies if this is covered somewhere else already.

EDIT

I found this:

Sequential circuit with more than 10 LEDs

which talks about using 2 x 4017's to get a bunch of LED's going, and also SIPO shift registers. Seems like it would work, but again, the length of time required makes me think the 555 timer won't work. Am I right on that? Still leaves the issue of controlling the audio…