Dimming EL Wire

[Bryson]

So, I have a project coming up which may involve using some EL wire "sculptures". Has anyone here got experience of dimming EL wire?

 

Are there inverters available that accept DMX? Or 0-10v analog?

 

Does it dim smoothly?

 

Is there a "snap" on or off below a certain threshold or does it dim all the way down?

 

How "mallable" is the wire? How stiff? Would it hold it's shape on it's own, or would it need a support wire underneath?

 

How tight a turn can it make?

 

Does painting parts black work to make short "breaks" in it without actually severing it?

 

I think that's it for now....

[ramdram]

http://www.elwire.com/faq/faq.html

 

some gen from folk who have used it. If the volts are about a 100v...and frequency sensitive...have you thought about using it as speaker cable on the 100v o/p?

 

Would need a "bit" of tweaking, ** laughs out loud **.

 

HTH

[adam2]

I have dimmed EL wire simply by reducing the DC input voltage to the driver, works fine in practice and dims to vitually zero.

The wire is flexible and wont hold its shape over more than a centimeter or two.

It may be painted black to create short breaks.

The bending radius is a few diameters. If you bend it tighter than that then it might still work but reliability declines.

The light output declines in time and you may need to allow for replacements on a long running show.

[AndrewGrant]

I found EL wire to be a total pain! I had to frame some metal panels, when I got to the right-angle I found it very difficult to make it round the edge sharp. On one occasion when replacing a faulty piece the new wire snapped.

 

I also found it doesn't dim very well at all. It snaps on in a slightly LED way at around 4/5%, it also flickered slightly when fading out over long times. If you get it, make sure you buy it pre-terminated, it is a total arse to do yourself!

 

I have heard that the quality does decline over long periods, however during the six week run I used it on it always looked fine when I popped in to check on it.

 

I would second ramdram's comment on using www.elwire.com They were very helpful and did a good deal.

 

Andrew

[mcnallca]

I have dimmed EL wire simply by reducing the DC input voltage to the driver, works fine in practice and dims to vitually zero.

The wire is flexible and wont hold its shape over more than a centimeter or two.

It may be painted black to create short breaks.

The bending radius is a few diameters. If you bend it tighter than that then it might still work but reliability declines.

The light output declines in time and you may need to allow for replacements on a long running show.

 

Re:Dimming How did you do this in practice?, having some difficulty on my end.

[alistermorton]

One way to do it is use a full bridge AC dimmer with a step up transformer.. This one here is wireless, but the same principals apply to a wired solution.

[adam2]

I have dimmed EL wire simply by reducing the DC input voltage to the driver, works fine in practice and dims to vitually zero.

The wire is flexible and wont hold its shape over more than a centimeter or two.

It may be painted black to create short breaks.

The bending radius is a few diameters. If you bend it tighter than that then it might still work but reliability declines.

The light output declines in time and you may need to allow for replacements on a long running show.

 

Re:Dimming How did you do this in practice?, having some difficulty on my end.

 

I connected the EL wire to the supplied driver which was intended to be powered from a 9 volt battery. For test purposes, instead of a 9 volt battery I used a variable voltage DC bench power supply and observed smooth dimming from full output at 9 volts input down to almost off at about 2 volts input.

 

For regular use I used a cheap NON REGULATED 9 volt DC power supply from Maplin, powered from a dimmer. This might in theory kill the cheap little power supply but in practice it worked fine. This was some years ago, note the date of my post, but I don't believe that anything fundamental has changed in the intervening years.

 

 

 

[dkumpula]

For regular use I used a cheap NON REGULATED 9 volt DC power supply from Maplin, powered from a dimmer. This might in theory kill the cheap little power supply but in practice it worked fine. This was some years ago, note the date of my post, but I don't believe that anything fundamental has changed in the intervening years.

 

Thanks for this Adam (et al).

 

I started looking at the more expensive solutions with the intent to get DMX controlled dimming for my EL wire. After reading this post, I gave this a try with a cheapo wall-wart PSU and a DMX dimmer pack. I'm getting good dimming from full-off at a channel value of about 40 to full-on at around 120. On the first go, I'm not seeing any flickering or other adverse effects. I am going to add red and green to my existing blue and with some diffusing wrap in hopes of getting a reasonably broad range of colors.

 

-David