Enginursday: Building a Wireless EL Wire Dance Suit, Part 2
Adventures in building an EL wire dance suit for a troupe.
Note: If you have not read my previous blog post, make sure to check it out before reading further!
We're back! There were a lot of steps to consider when completing the project, most of which had to be repeated for each of the seven dancers.
The most time consuming part of making seven wireless EL wire dance suits was actually sewing the 42 meters (~1,653.5 inches) all by hand. I'm not an expert at sewing, so adding EL wire along a hoodie's arms made out of stretchy material was not the easiest. I had to put together a jig made out of cardboard to help sew into the arms.
 |
 |
Adding EL wire along the side of polyester pants was easier, since the material did not move around.
The kids aren't all the same size, so I decided to make a few custom EL wire extension cables rather then tailoring the suits for each dancer. This also made it easier to quickly disconnect the hoodie or pants from the inverter.
I decided to use a 12V inverter to power the EL wires. To make it run off a single power supply with the EL Sequencer and XBee, the wires for the inverter's input had to be switched out. Instead of a barrel jack, a 2-pin JST connector was used.
How Do You Build Such a Thing? Part 2
In addition to making a wireless glove controller, here are a few more tutorials needed to complete this project.
EL Wire Pants
In this tutorial, we will sew standard electroluminescent (EL) wire to a pair of pants.
How to Make a Custom EL Wire Extension Cable
In this tutorial, we will make a custom EL Wire extension cable as an alternative to splicing wire.
Modifying Your EL Wire Inverter
In this tutorial, we will modify the 12V EL wire inverter to power the EL Sequencer/EL Escudo Dos off a single power supply.
Tune in some time in the future when I broadcast a signal from the wireless glove controller to remotely trigger each EL Sequencer. ;D
