Sound activated El Wire. Help?

[tattoogoddess]

So I searched eplaya and could not find any info on this really. I bought some 2.3 mm EL wire today (yeah read it might be to thin)( it is going on my camel back at night then the 2 red ones I got are going on a bra and at the bottom of a butt duster as I call it. (think queen of hearts, the peice of fabric that drapes off her bum and off her sides) anyways....
I want to make them sound activated like this-


This is what I was told would be a good option to make them work. Problem is one is on my bra, the other twords my knee caps.(3 foot pieces) so two issues here. One this sound activator only has one connection. SO how could I go about making these two wire connect into one? and has anyone ever used this before?
http://shopping.netsuite.com/s.nl/c.ACC ... /id.781/.f

If not should I just get a longer EL wire piece and is there some way to "black out" parts of the wire with idk paint or something?

[junglesmacks]

They sell sound activated EL wire drivers. Simple. Check out coolneon.com.

EDIT: on my phone. Didn't read question fully. Will absorb later.. lol.

Still check out coolneon as a resource though.


Re edit. Simple. Splice the wires into a y connection. Use small gauge speaker wire.

[tattoogoddess]

lol yep that is where i posted I found the driver at. I will wait till you can read it all

[some seeing eye]

There are two wires coming from the sound actuated driver. Split them at that point and run 2 wires to your upper body EL wire and 2 wires to your hem. In electric speak, they are wired in parallel. With a few "plug and play connectors" you can make the split and use regular wire where it is not illuminated. Coolneon would probably do it for a small fee if you gave them the measurements.

[SnowBlind]

If not should I just get a longer EL wire piece and is there some way to "black out" parts of the wire with idk paint or something?

You can definitely black out elwire. It's easiest done with black tape or shrinkwrap tube. Usually you do that if you want some black pieces in your art though. Also, if you want to make a really sharp turn, which elwire doesn't like, you can make a loop and black the looped part out.

However, for your application, using elwire and blacking it out seems like a waste of money. Also the driver you posted only powers 15 feet, so you'd lose some of that.

As some seeing eye said, you can use regular wire as the extension. You can do it like he describes, in parallel, basically building a Y connector. You could even do it in series, by connecting regular wire to the end of the first elwire, running it to the second, and then connecting it there. This requires a little more tricky soldering though, so personally I would go with the parallel option too.

You can buy extra connectors from cool neon and use those to build the Y connector. That's especially useful if your elwire already has connectors soldered on, then you save yourself any soldering on elwire and you only have to solder the regular cables.

[BBadger]

The longer the EL-wire, the more power it needs. I would not black out the wire, and keep the runs as short as possible especially if it's going to not be used for light. Maybe consider having two inverters. Two inverters will mean your EL-wire will last longer between battery swaps (though you'll be carrying more batteries). Having two of those sound-activated ones could also light up different patterns.

[junglesmacks]

Wow.. sorry for the drunken and not even fully reading posting. Yeesh. It was vodka and poker night and I was on my phone while on break.

Couple of things:

Use two different drivers.. one for your bag and one for your body. You don't want to have to have extra wires attaching you to your bag. Also, you'll want your bag solidly lit up instead of sound reactive I'm thinking.. so you could just just a basic driver.

For your body, just splice in some extra wire and run it to the beginning of each length. One thing about EL wire is that there is no positive and negative side.. so it's impossible to mess up the polarity of the wires. One question though as Bbadg noted is how long are your run lengths? If they're more than 15 feet combined, that driver won't work and/or it will be dim.

[garyt]

My experience with sound activated drivers are, they don't work very well. If you're in a space with really loud sound (bass) or not loud enough, you won't get the effect you desire. This video was made in a room with probably PC speakers turned up at the right distance and volume. I'd just get a regular driver and put it on blink mode. My 1.75 cents

[some seeing eye]

We have some great EL wire experts here and they all are offering great advise. ePlaya for the win. If you ask Cool Neon nicely, they may be able to send a schematic of their driver. With or without that, the internal workings diagram of their circuit, a competent engineer, hacker, circuit bender should be able to modify it to add an adjustment that will allow it to respond to very loud to normal volumes.

[tattoogoddess]

We have some great EL wire experts here and they all are offering great advise. ePlaya for the win. If you ask Cool Neon nicely, they may be able to send a schematic of their driver. With or without that, the internal workings diagram of their circuit, a competent engineer, hacker, circuit bender should be able to modify it to add an adjustment that will allow it to respond to very loud to normal volumes.

Very true! I think there is a camp out on the playa that does el wire right? My step dad is a electrician so he has all the tools to fix the el wire here to if i get the balls to do it.
I ended up getting a 3 meter strand of El wire last night before the shipper sent the other orders from me out. So I now have 2- 1 meter red's 1-3 meter red 1-3 meter green 1-3meter blue. Then got the sound activator for short an a 8 AA battery pack from the shop.

The blue and green I was planning on using on my camel back or on clothes. Planning on bringing out needle and thread and just quich whip sticking them on what ever i wear that night. The red how ever will be on one costume only so will prob glue and sew a head of time



So the yellow would be the 3 meter the stuff that is pink would be blacked out. I would run the black out down the shirt and onto the "butt flap" pannel. if i have enough i will black out and trace around the heart. I also have those 2- 1 meter peices that I THINK i might use in my tutu Those would not be hooked up to the sound control as those would make it longer then 15 feet.

As you said I am also a bit worried about the sound but I know you can controll it a wee bit but still I think it might be to loud. what do you think of this option? Also I have never used el wire so do not know, it is heavy in the sense it would weight the back end of my tutu down sense this is on my butt? thinking about running wire down the side and bottom to give it some strength.
Any ways let me know what you think.

[BBadger]

For any EL wires that you need "always on" set them into blinking mode if you have it. It'll save you a lot of battery juice for something that is mostly just to prevent you from being run over. I know, who cares about batteries? Well, it's not really the cost, so much as the effort of swapping batteries out when those EL wires get dimmer. Hell, for a backpack I'd probably just stick a blinky LED stick there instead.

GaryT makes a good point about those sound-activated modules: they do have pretty shitty response and the only way to improve that is to add an amplifier between the microphone and the rest of the circuitry. I'm not sure if it's even worth the effort with extra wiring, possibly an extra battery, etc. You might be better off just remaining fully lit, or blinking. Here's a circuit you can solder up if you want a pre-amp. You can omit the RCA jack and just wire that directly to the input on your sound modulator. You could even move the preamp/mic somewhere else on your body where it'll pick up more sound.