Electroluminescent wire

BillDer

Anyone ever work with Electroluminescent wire? I have a project in mind and was wondering if anyone has experience with this?
I know I'll need a triac to control it and an inverter to power it. I noticed sparcfun has a board with triacs but it seems to be for either the arduino or ATmega.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Timmoore

I looked at the sparkfun arduino version a short time ago (this one http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=9259) and if I remember correctly it takes several digital outputs (9 I think) + power so it shouldn't be hard to connect it to a prop board.

RinksCustoms

i had EL wire ran under my roller blades for the skate rink like 10 years ago, no triacs used. kits i used were of the 12V variety and came with a little inverter. I used a simple logic controller which was basically two 4013's cascaded to provide a three sequence output to a few logic (enabled) oscillators to give an alternating double flash, single alt flash, steady bright, and steady dim settings. none involved an MCU or Triacs. It had two 2n2222 transistors that controlled the 12V side of the inverters (there were two) and if you brought the input power to around 9V, the EL dimmed. Output was under 180V@12V input power.

There are numerous examples of using/interfacing to triacs with MCU's if your interested in controlling segments of EL from one inverter. Note that EL wire does have a current draw, so if you have different length segments & need them to all be the same brightness, you'll need to adj the voltages slightly with series resistors. I dont recall if it was AC or DC output. Also the majority of EL is phosphor coated STEEL wire with ~40ga steel wire wound around the phosphor coating.

EL is not water proof/resistant, if the phosphor gets wet, it will not light.

Hope this helps,
Michael

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mctrivia

the output is 400Hz AC on the units I have used.

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sssidney

I've done a few projecting using el-wire and a propeller.





I designed a board to drive the el-wire that the prop controls over I2C.

The details are on my blog http://sidnancy.posterous.com/

Let me know if you have any questions.

Post Edited (sssidney) : 8/5/2009 5:17:16 PM GMT