How To Work With EL Wire

As you can see, [Phillip Torrone] has a nice start on his Tron costume for the movie premiere. Electroluminescent wire is what makes these costumes glow and if you’ve never worked with the stuff before you’re in for a treat. Adafruit posted a tutorial explaining how to work with EL wire. The process isn’t hard, but they’ve got a few nice tips, like using copper tape as a platform for soldering the corona wires. There is also a discussion of the math involved with properly powering your setup.

In this case, Adafruit is using ready-made power inverter units. If you’ve interested in hacking together your own inverter take a look at the background information from [Jeri Ellsworth].

17 thoughts on “How To Work With EL Wire

  1. Man, i was thinking about a Tron costume just yesterday evening. After the Ironman mini Arc Reactor which i didn’t make it would be a nice thing to build.
    But i’m not exhibitionist enough to wear it :)

  2. I wish all of these tutorials wouldn’t gloss over the difficulty in removing the PVC insulation, without cutting the corona wires off.

    The trick I found, was to use an exacto knife to cut the insulation in the gaps between the two corona wires. Then, carefully try to strip it away with wire strippers. If you just try to cut and strip with wire strippers, 9 times out of 10, the corona wires will break off.

    To add to that, I cannot stress enough how important the copper tape is. The corona wires are so fine, that any stress induced by the power wire, will snap them. The costume I built ended up having to be disassembled twice, to restrip and reconnect the power leads, because the corona wires snapped.

  3. @Ekaj- How does one get all that ‘disposable time’ to play with stuff?

    “September 5th, 2004, [Phillip Torrone] posts the very first article on a new site called Hackaday.com. He designed our logo, forged our identity, and then moved on to help shape many other hacker friendly groups including Make magazine, and Adafruit technologies.”

    Take 6 years, work your butt off, then you *might* have that opportunity. Or do what I do- sleep less ;)

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