Wouldn't it be great to be the kind of person who documents your work as you go along, instead of doing a half-assed job of it at the end?
Joel built 100 switches with 50k resistors, which we're going to wire in parallel to get a resistance between 50k-500 ohm (depending on number of buttons held at any one time. This resistance gets put into a rc circuit on our pic to give an approximate measure of how many buttons are pressed down. (diagram 1)
We're figuring out how to make a dimmer controlled by our pic. Looks like we're going to use a opto-triac (diagram 2)
Building a cute mechanical arm to ring the gong (image1)
mounting the button connectors on the seats