Months of failure lead up to this EL panel dimmer that pulses to the music

el-panel-dimmer

Way back in March [Ch00f] took on a for-hire project to make a suit that lights up to the music. He decided to build something based around a pulsating EL panel. He’s put a lot of time and tried of a few different techniques, but he finally has a working EL panel dimmer.

This is a saga we’ve kept … Read the rest

How TO dim EL wire: Current limiting the oscillator!

[Ch00f] finally made a breakthrough with his efforts dimming EL wire.  He’s been at it for months and the last we heard his TRIAC idea had sputtered out. Not to be discouraged and with an determination we have to admire he has been hard at work reverse engineering others’ and developing his own methods. He put all of this … Read the rest

How not to dim EL panels, TRIACs!

We’ve all been there: an exciting brilliant idea, scratched onto a napkin, hastily plugged into a breadboard, all for naught.  Even the best ideas sometimes suffer from a heavy dose of reality.  [Ch00f] over at ch00ftech recently had a similar experience dimming an EL panel of his using a TRIAC and some clever waveform manipulation. Instead of tossing the parts … Read the rest

High Voltage Hacks: All About Electroluminescence

Although many might not know it, electroluminescent materials use high voltage, and thus qualify for our featured topic. Many may assume that these sheets work in the same way as LED lights, using low-voltage DC power.  This, however, is not the case, as they need around 100 volts of AC current to allow them to light up.

For a battery-powered … Read the rest

More EL chemistry: Luminescent ink

[Jeri Ellsworth] continues her experiments with electroluminescence, this time she’s making EL ink. The ink she’s looking for is Zinc Sulfate in a solution. The process she chose is to re-dope some glow powder so that it can be excited by the field around an AC current. In her video (embedded after the break) she talks about the chemical … Read the rest

BAMF2010: DIY electroluminescent displays

In this video from Maker Faire, [Jon Beck] of CLUE — the Columbia Laboratory for Unconventional Electronics — demonstrates the unexpected ease of creating custom electroluminescent (EL) displays using materials from DuPont and common t-shirt screen printing tools. Eagle-eyed reader [ithon] recognized the Hack a Day logo among the custom shapes, which escaped our notice at the time. Sorry, Jon! … Read the rest