The problem I found was the battery pack was pretty massive, as displayed on the picture. The battery pack cannot fit inside the gauntlet itself - I tried that. It was difficult to find a place to hide the battery pack so I ended up exposing that. As you can imagine that’s pretty ugly.
ALSO my EL wire eventually stopped working. I assume because the EL wire had to “curve” by about 160 degrees as depicted in this picture. I had to curve the EL wire back inside my gauntlet to “loop” it around:
Question: Is EL wire not able to curve like that? It worked for a day and then the light diminished, then it stopped working in total.
The upside to buying something like this on Ebay is someone who has no experience soldering can work on it. I have 0 experience with EL wire, much less other electronics like this.
Question: Is there a smaller battery pack I could use that’s possibly half the size or even smaller?
If it means customizing and actually learning how to solder, I’m cool with that.
I just found this inverter from adafruit that looks quite small. It takes a CR2032 coin cell battery, and can power up to 50cm of EL wire. I don’t know anything about it beyond that.
I did up stick man EL costumes a few years back and I put a large (6 x AA cells) and an inverter in the jacket pocket. Then I ran wires to the various lengths of EL wire with connector for the pants and head. This requires soldering and connecting various lengths of EL wire (lots of info on the web for this) but then you can have a battery pack that runs all night. A smaller battery pack means less run time.
The curves probably did the EL wire in. You are better to keep it reasonably straight and make any curves gentle. So for this you would be better with several smaller lengths on the outside (it looks like you wrapped it around the inside and outside) Means doing soldering but would cut the length in half so you get double the run time…
I enough people are interested we could do an EL wire night as I had lots of practice workign on my costumes…
In that case I’ll have to find a better way then curving the EL wire - I did indeed wrap it around the inside and outside. I couldn’t find a better way to attach my EL wire to my gauntlets and still have two lines of blue wire on my gauntlet, so I looped it.
For the new design, this means I would need two separate EL wires with two separate battery sources to achieve the same look? I think I’d be ok with a smaller battery, mostly because of how exposed this big 2xAA pack looks here:
I would be highly interested in an EL wire night workshop or a series of workshops!
You could cut the EL wire into two lengths and connect them to the same battery pack. On my stickman costumes I had multiple lengths connected back to a single battery pack. However all my EL wire was affixed to black clothing so the wires could easily be hidden:
Your costume looks a bit harder cuz you probably don’t want wires across your arms. What are the gauntlets made out of? Perhaps you could carve some of the material away (on a side people don’t see as much) then glue the battery pack in and paint it up to match the rest.Least then no one would really notice the battery pack…
If anyone else is interested in a EL workshop let me know and I’ll see if we can schedule something in the next while…
I guess the sharp corners made my EL wire fail then
Definitely would be interested in an EL wire shop.
I didn’t know multiple EL wires could be connected to the same source - I might just have to do that instead for the gauntlets instead. The gauntlets are made from craft foam - so I like the idea of carving a piece of it off in the back and somehow securing the battery pack to it. The battery pack would definitely be way less exposed than it currently is now…
