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Project: EL Pants Summary: These El-Wire pants were inspired by a burningman character I saw streaking through the playa in 2002. The person was convered entirely with EL-Wire. It looked as though a camel back was being used to hold water, batteries, and inverters. The inverters appeared to be around 8KHz in blink mode style. The suit looked great, and got a good deal of Super hero type reception from on-lookers. The suit was also highly visible for miles. Needless to say as a blinky artist I found it quite inspiring. I liked the concept of wear enough glowing stuff, and get all the attention around you. I also had been playing around with Microchip's PIC 16F based processors for over a year at the time I started this project. I decided it would be fun to use PICs to control the EL wire so I can have precise control as to which color is illuminated and what the sequence of lights will be. The EL wire sequencing and color control turned out to be fairly easy. The most difficult part was sewing the EL wire to fabric. I had choosen a rather expensive Brooks Brothers pinstripe suit that I no longer used as the base clothing. Then I proceeded over the next month to sew a piece of angel hair EL wire to the suit pants using a sewing machine. This work was tedious. Sadly these pants cannot be washed as the EL wire would be damaged by the process. The wiring is to this day a issue as well. You can see that the circuit board, and wires that control the EL illumination are hangingout in plain site. Thus distracting from the asthetic view of the project. The jacket has not been finished, but I'm still considering taking this on at some point. It was only in later projects that I resolved what I felt were open issues with the EL pants. Using multi-layer velcro helps keep the clothing washable, and hide wires, and components. Using conductive thread helps cut down on wire mess. Anyway I will go ahead and pat myself on the back for one part of this project. Through a local NY group that focuses on PIC microcontrollers and programming them I received lots of help. The group had multiple meetings that all we covered was how to make PCB's (Printed Circuit Boards). This EL Pants project was the first time I homebrewed my own Printed Circuit Board. It did quite a bit for making the pants work more reliable and even help shrink the component layout. I am comparing this single layer board, to the breadboards I was using before making PCB's. schematic (PDF) Movies |
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