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!
/me consults list of technologies essential to the future survival of the planet… crosses off touch sensitive EL wire.
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
Well this is in Volume 7, appendix III, page 691, under “Blinky, Shiny and Flashy stuff to distract the proles while you get actual work done.”
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…
I’d make some Tron-like suit using it and go to burning man, but I think I’d get felt up by more dudes than gals…
Then “strategically” place where the wires go.
Not sure that’d help as much as you think it would.
You can change the colour of EL Wire by changing the frequency of the power source.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gROEIlym6Dw
Now at last we can show, for all to see, whether we are on the side of the MCP or the Users!
HAHA, I think they should just call it Tron Wire because that is what everyone thinks of when they see it.
Now if you could just change it from red to blue…
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.
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.
Is there EL wire that does require a huge inverter?
This board seems to have an integrated inverter.
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!
Hahaha, he is right. That GIF is about 8.8MBs.
I still like it though. (8.8MBs! Too much. Chop dat gif in haf plz.)
Or better, keep up with the times and use html5 video (no auto play) …
Yeah, reading sites on WAP can be hard.
That didn’t age well.
it’s a human useless machine!
Add a second HV Inverter somewhere so it’s more mandatory for the human to turn it off.
That depends on what you’re into
I discovered this in 2012 and put a video up!!