EL Wire Gets Some Touching After Effects

If you thought glowy wearables have had their time, guess again! After a few years designing on the side, [Josh] and [his dad] have created a nifty feature for EL wire: they’ve made it touch sensitive. But, of course, rather than simply show it off to the world, they’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign to put touch-sensitive El Wire in the hands of any fashion-inspired electronics enthusiast.

El Wire (and tape) are composed of two conducting wires separated by a phosphor layer. (Starting to sound like a capacitor?) While the details are, alas, closed for now, the interface is Arduino compatible, making it wide open to a general audience of enthusiasts without needing years of muscled programming experience. The unit itself, dubbed the Whoaboard, contains the EL Wire drivers for four channels at about 10ft of wire length.

El Wire has always been a crowd favorite around these parts (especially in Russia). We love that [Josh’s] Whoaboard takes a conventional material that might already be lying around your shelves and transforms it into a fresh new interface. With touch-sensitivity, we can’t wait to see the community start rolling out everything from costumes to glowy alien cockpits.

Have a look at [Josh’s] creation after the break!

24 thoughts on “EL Wire Gets Some Touching After Effects

    1. I’d have to think the list of technologies not essential for the survival of the planet is long one. The list of technologies essential for the survival of human kinds would be a short on if if comfort and entertaiment items are left of the list

    2. Have to wonder why it was on the list to start with. Did you start off with every known thing in the Universe, then cross them off one by one? If you’re interested, I have a radical new approach to your conundrum that might save you some time…

  1. When it comes to fashion, I left with; different strokes for different folks. An electronic wrist watch the only wearable technology I could see myself wearing up to and on my death bed.

    1. You don’t want a tractor beam wrist pack, so it’s like using the force, or accio screwdriver?

      I think you can do it with high accuracy high power beamforming, sonic or EM. Take as much processing as rack of GPUs, so probably 10 years when we get that on a phone SoC.

  2. Congradulations hackaday. 10.2MB to load this page. Or at least try to load this page. I gave up trying to read it on my phone.

    The whole point of embedded video that doesn’t auto load is to prevent large load times. What’s with the insanely large GIFs!

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