Dave's Crazy-Ass 80-channel EL Sequencer Project Page

My 80-channel EL Sequencer Project

updated: 17 June 2008

Electroluminescent Wire is pretty amazing stuff. You see lots of it at Buring Man, and people do some really creative stuff with it. You can read a little bit about EL wire's remarkable properties here and here. Or you can Google. Basically, the stuff is like coax cable with clear jackets. Run a couple hundred volts AC through the stuff, and it glows brighly, while drawing very little current. It looks a lot like neon, except you you can power the stuff with just a small battery and an inverter, and you can also buy sequencers that animate the EL wire by flashing the various segments in predermined patterns. You can buy all this stuff from a variety of different vendors. In the past I have bought stuff from VibeLights.com, CoolNeon.com and CooLight.com. The biggest sequencer I've seen anyone offer for sale is 12 channels.

I also did a lot of research on the web (Google is your friend) and learned that the stuff is reasonably easy to solder and work with, and I also found several schematics for EL wire sequencers that others had made. Most of these were pretty small, 4 or 8 channels. I thought, hmm, wouldn't it be cool to do something crazy, like 32 channels or 64 channels? Or why stop there? Really, your only practical limits are board size and how many wires you really feel like soldering. So why not build the bigggest, baddest-ass EL sequencer anyone's ever seen? So that's what these pages are all about. My first step would be to do a proof-of-concept prototype with 16 channels, and if that goes well, build one with as many channels as I can. Swing for the bleachers.

I should point out that I don't have a background in hardware design. I've written embedded software for a long time, and I've spent a not-insignificant amount of that time debugging other people's buggy hardware. But I've never actually designed buggy hardware of my own. And before I started I'd never laid out a circuit board. I went into this thing armed with strong embedded software skills... and not much else. What could go wrong?

This project has gone through a few different iterations, and will probably go through a few more. But I did get the 16-channel prototype going, and as of this writing I'm working on an 80-channel version that can be daisy-chained for 160, 240, etc channels. It also (hopefully) will drive either EL Wire or LED Rope light, depending on what parts the circuit board is populated with. To the left you'll find links to the current design, some abandoned designs, and a blog outlining the daily trials and tribulations of getting the thing to work.

Enjoy!

Dave