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 across the room in a fit aside and moving on he goes into a detailed analysis of what went wrong.

This method differs from the way most EL drivers dim output loads, instead of chopping the output like a PWM controlled LED the TRIAC snips the ends of the waveform and makes an ugly but less powerful output. The issue with this method is that when you cut the waveform during non-zero crossings it causes massive current spikes. These can wreak havoc on a cheap EL inverter and generally cause headaches all around.  [Ch00f ] speculates that his woes may be due to the fact that EL wire is a capacitive load, causing voltage to fall out of phase with the current. This is one of those engineering problems with a thousand and one answers, we can’t wait to see what he comes up with.

Check out the writeup for all the “deets” (as [ch00f] would say) as it is a pretty good primer on TRIAC operation. If there isn’t enough glowy wire in this post you can also check out this sound reactive panel or an informative guide on EL or even more from [ch00f] in general.

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 solution, this means converting the battery’s DC power to AC. Adafruit has a good tutorial about working with EL wire and powering it up using a portable inverter. One should obviously be careful to properly insulate any clothing using this material as being shocked is generally not fun.

The video after the break is pretty long, but is well produced and will give you a good background of EL use. If you don’t have 30 minutes to dedicate to this, be sure to at least skip to 2:43 to see one of the coolest EL shirts we’ve seen. Continue reading “High Voltage Hacks: All About Electroluminescence”

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 properties she’s after by detailing a cubic lattice of zinc and sulfur atoms with an added copper atom (adding that atom is a process called doping).

The quick and dirty synopsis of the experiment starts by washing the glow powder with dish soap to acquire zinc sulfide crystals. Then she combined copper sulfate and zinc shavings from the inside of a modern penny to yield copper metal and zinc sulfate suspended in solution. That was mixed with the zinc sulfide from the glow powder washing and doped with a little more copper sulfate. The excess liquid is poured off, the test tube is capped with glass frit, and the whole thing hits the kiln to start the reaction. The result glows when excited by alternating current, but could have been improved by adding chlorine atoms into the mix.

We’re excited every time we see one of [Jeri’s] new chemistry hacks. We’d love to see more so if you’ve come across interesting chemistry experiments during your Internet travels, please let us know about them. Just make sure you have some idea of what you’re doing when working with chemicals… safety first.

Continue reading “More EL Chemistry: Luminescent Ink”

BAMF2010: DIY Electroluminescent Displays

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPclj5lbz48]

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! Very cool project, even if the setup is a bit steep. You’ll find links to materials at the project site.

If the interviewer seems especially sharp, that’s because it’s none other than [Jeri “Circuit Girl” Ellsworth], who makes transistors from scratch and designed the C64 DTV. We’re not worthy!