Sound Reactive EL Panel Dimmer


Posted on Feb 6, 2014

Let me tell you a tale. 8 months and 18 days ago, on March 25, I was sent an email requesting a commissioned piece of electronic clothing similar to my DJ jacket for a musical performer to wear on stage. I mulled it over for a bit, and came up with the idea of a sound-reactive EL panel dimmer. Unlike most cheap `sound reactive` stuff that just bli


Sound Reactive EL Panel Dimmer
Click here to download the full size of the above Circuit.

nks to music, I wanted my dimmer to allow for a more appealing pulsating effect. EL panels are just like EL wire except instead of having a phosphorescent insulating tube wrapped around the inner wire in a coaxial pair, it has a sheet of the same material placed between two conductive sheets. They operate on the same principle: need 100V-ish AC input at EL wires, panels, and other materials don`t seem to be generally well understood by the sources provided to me by the internet. I couldn`t find any good sources explaining how to make a dimmer, so I set out into uncharted water to come up with my own solution. Almost two months after that email, I had created my first sound-reactive EL panel dimmer. While it was probably one of the most educational projects I`ve worked on, it was also the biggest disaster I`ve ever blogged about. The dimmer didn`t work very well. The panel wasn`t getting bright enough. I decided not to mail the dimmer to my client and instead try to figure out how to improve it (note the FAQ where it says that I don`t work well with deadlines). Since then, I`ve been writing a ton of posts detailing my experiments with EL wire: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Well, I think I FINALLY HAVE IT! Okay, it`s not perfect. There were numerous ugly reworks required to make this work, and it still has some room for improvement, but as a proof of concept, it is totally done. I will probably only need one more short blog post after...




Leave Comment

characters left:

Related Circuits

  • New Circuits

    .

     


    Popular Circuits

    12 Volt, 10 Amp Switching Power Supply
    Motorcycle anti-theft Alarm
    Wien-bridge-filter
    Mole Deterrent Teardown
    how to build an inverter
    ATR0981 ATR0981 UHF SiGe Front-end IC
    Digital Remote Thermometer
    Positioning Systems for Bed Profiling in Hydraulics Physical Models
    SRS5250S Application circuit diagram
    Aeration ponds remind circuit



    Top