Last night was the last day of 2013. So I figured I should do something new to celebrate the new year.

Hence, some EL-wire fun. EL-wire, or Electroluminescent Wire, is a lot of fun to use. It looks really cool and is very flexible and easy to use. But it cannot be lighted with batteries or a wall-wart adapter, so you have to use an inverter.

I took an EL-wire and passed it through some transparent plastic tubes I had laying around to make the numbers 1 and 4. The EL-wire doesn’t light up very brightly, so I let it pass through each section twice, see figure below.

It was very simple to hook up the wire to the EL-inverter, and the EL-inverter to two 1,5V AA batteries. The EL-inverter converts those 3 Volts to an impressive 114 Volts for the EL-wire. This was with almost fresh batteries.

The current was about 69 mA, which is a little more than the current of three LEDs. With the fresh batteries. Not bad.

Anyway, I hot-glued the whole thing to a board and walked around with it just after midnight. It did generate a few smiles from people passing by…