Disco Tartan

A long exposure photography project I've been working on. To make a tartan with light. Sorry about the lack of pictures in the materials and construction phases I hadn't planned on writing an instructable or even known if it would work. :)

I wish I could have had a black room to take the shot in but limited time and money....

Step 1 Picking the tartan

The tartan you pick will determine the El wire you buy. Consider the long stretches of colors and tiny accented lines for your led selection.

For the Nova Scotian tartan I bought 6 foot lengths of green and blue with white and red LEDs for the accented lines.

Comments

[SubFusion]

Many years ago playing around EL wires, my friends found out that cheap one time cameras with flash can be used as power suply for EL wires. The curcuit that charges the capacitor for the flash, is high voltage. Beware of long time damage to EL wire because of over voltage. Most photo shops will give you used cameras for free. :)

[Joe Martin]

That is amazing!

[PKM]

Well, I never thought of doing that with EL wire :)

It would be cool if you made one with individually addressable sections of EL wire, perhaps an inch long- then you could use the strip as a POV display that actually filled in the space with its pixels rather than lighting up lines like the LED ones do.

Of course, this might require a lot of inverters and all the related gubbins so might be impractical.

[incase]

I originally wanted to use a PVC pipe instead of a dowel with differentially sized PVC sleeves so I could make different family tartans quick and easily but highland games season is over around here. Maybe next year.