EL Driver Board

Previously, I made a homebrew EL wire driver to be used with a LilyPad Arduino  (http://www.instructables.com/id/Programmable-LilyPad-EL-Wire-Dress/).  We at Electric Stitches (and with the help of iNMOJO) designed and made a pretty snappy looking sewable EL Driver available here: http://bit.ly/q4DnXP.  The board, used in tandem with the LilyPad, will give you control of the EL wire and allow you to flash and fade the strands of light in response to any input to the LilyPad.  And, with a bit of code, you can create beautiful patterns and illuminated lines as you strut your wearable down the street!

As this is an OSHW board please feel free to download the designs from: http://electricstitches.com/

EL Wire can be dangerous and can give you a mild shock. We have taken an extra step and added conformal epoxy coating to help prevent unintended shocks

Step 1 Materials

For this project you will need:

• 3 Strands of EL Wire 
• 3V  inverter (Must be 3V)
• EL Wire Driver Board
• LilyPad Arduino
• Conductive Thread
• 5 JST Cables
• LiPo Battery

Total Cost: $40

Comments

[stagr.lee]

I have this experiment repeated. Biggest debug I had to do was unplug the EL Wire power inverter while the USB is hooked up to get the program uploaded. With the inverter hooked up to the circuit and the USB computer link hooked up, the computer and the Arduino wouldn't talk.

THANKS! Looks great.

Reading your code, I've noticed a few things. First, there is never a state where all the EL Wires are off (except between the square wave flashes) . 2nd, there is never a state where there are more than one EL Wire on. Was this done for electronic reasons or artistic reasons? I'm wondering if there is a limitation of the EL Wire power inverter or the Triac driver board. The design I'm at will have a lot of all on states and all off states.

Look forward to your thoughts Quasiben.

[quasiben]

Many inverters that are designed with EL wire in mind usually come rated with the specific length (1-5ft,5-10ft, 10-20ft...). Usually, as the length of el wire increases the inverter power output and size of the inverter increase as well.

So what if you want a small inverter (1-5ft) and have more than 5 ft of el wire connected to the Sewable EL Driver board? You could "fake" all the lines being on by switching on and off each line in succession. This is a common solution and one that i wanted to demonstrate.

[stagr.lee]

Clever! Should I worry about all off? I'm running the same 3V 5-15' inverter you have linked to Coolight.com and my sequence will have 5 seconds of all off. Making essentially a Smiley Cheshire Spider that disappears.

Using 3 AAA batteries at 4.5V. Looks good...

[Eddy Dean]

Great, but, can this be washed?

[quasiben]

I will try washing later this week