pretty lights

[gfish]

Still struggling to post as often as I would like. So here is a quick video of a test of the el-wire jumpsuit I made last night. Still need to hook up the accelerometer and manual control potentiometer, and attach all the wires to the jumpsuit itself. But I'm pretty happy with the pulse-width-modulated fade in/fade out effect.

Comments

[mlerules.livejournal.com]

COOL!

[slantiness.livejournal.com]

And so, it seems that you are awesome

[solarbird]

You should be accompanied by the Main Street Electrical Parade theme music everywhere you go in that. XD

[slantiness.livejournal.com]

SECOND

[rollick.livejournal.com]

Oh man, new project, new excitement in watching the progression.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

This one is almost over, but I'm hoping to start a massive new one with the new year. We'll see. :)

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

That's beautiful!

How fast does elwire turn on/off? You're pwming it -- are you pwming the low or high voltage side of the elwire driver?

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I'm pwming the elwire driver output. Which is AC, so... both? :)

I'm using the circuit described here (http://www.oceanbeach.com/ches/travel/burning_man/artcar/el_wire_sequencer/design.html), 24 of them on 3 of my own custom boards. I have no idea what the cycle speed limit would be, but I'm pretty sure it's constrained by the Arduino's clock. (I can't use the dedicated PWM pins because there aren't enough, so I'm faking it in code.)

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

That's a cool setup. One thing I was wondering (which this answers) is if you had a supply for each wire, or you were multiplexing the one supply to multiple wires. It looks like you're running at least 4 strands at the same time: are you powering only a single strand, rapidly switching back and forth between adjacent strands, or can you drive {one,two,three} strands at the same time? (PS I like optotriacs more than TTL triacs: the latter seem to die a lot.)
We designed an elwire driver chip once but it didn't go into production so I didn't get a chance to mess with it, alas.

If at some point you decide you want more channels and start running into clock limits I'd be glad to build/send a dedicated board with a fast, high I/O-line AVR chip. I wish dragondaud still used LJ: he used to teach classes in microcontroller/ELwire decorating.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I can actually drive all 30 meters of elwire across all 24 strands at once. There is some dimming at that extreme, so I'll probably avoid doing that as much as possible, but it totally works. I'm just doing the pwming to give a nice gradual fade effect.

That's too bad, about the driver. The world needs better elwire drivers.