I got EL wire to dim! And I made this:
Dimming EL Wire Dreamcatcher
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Tag Archives: power electronics
I Should Give China More Credit
When this whole EL wire obsession started, I was a little disappointed with the poor efficiency I was getting out of my cheap Chinese EL wire drivers. I assumed that they (like a lot of things coming out of China) were poorly designed.
I was wrong.
Method #1,571 For Not Dimming An EL Panel: TRIAC
So, keeping up with my newly rekindled obsession with dimming my EL panel, I decided to try dimming with a TRIAC.
It didn't work.
The Follies of Driving a Capacitive Load with an H-bridge
Alright, so I had some post-publication weirdness following my last post, and it took me a few days to figure out exactly what was up, but I think I finally have all the details, and I learned a lot in the process.
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Dimming an EL panel is harder than it looks
So, this is a project that was nearly a month in the making. I set out to make a sound-reactive EL panel but found that driving EL in such a way is actually kind of difficult. If you've been following the blog, I've been working on this project in one way or another since my transformers article, and it's actually the reason I wrote that article.
Again, a disclaimer. There are over 8,000 words in this post that document all of my design decisions on this project. It is not a how-to guide, but if you have some background in EE, I hope that you gain something from it.
Without further ado, let's get down to business.
In Which I Begin to Lose My Mind
In my last post, I attempted to reverse engineer an EL wire power supply to see how it worked. This brought up a few more questions that I decided to investigate, and the following investigation brought me to the brink of insanity and back. I started to doubt the very consistency of space and time as time and time again my measurements seemed to prove what I knew should be impossible.
Seriously, ask any of my friends. I haven't been able to shut up about this all week. Continue reading
EL Wire is Spanish for...The Wire
So, after making the shutter shades that made a sensation all over the web, I had a lot of left over electroluminescent wire, and decided to do something with it:
Boom! 100% safer!
Junkyard Score
I took a trip to a junk yard this weekend and got a bunch of awesome stuff!
All for $30!
Getting the Wipers Wet
I had a chance to test my wipers today under a myriad of conditions. Here are the results where the x axis is speed setting (lower is faster) and the y axis is seconds per cycle:
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Testing my motor driver on my car's wipers (and freezing my fingers off)
So I had a chance tonight to test out my motor driver "in the field":
I was a little hasty because of the cold (and because my camera's battery was dying), but I did collect some useful data. And a video!