NEW PRODUCT – EL wire 4xAAA pocket inverter. The new EL inverter can drive a meter of tape, or 400 cm of high brightness EL wire. This is the most powerful pocket inverter we could find!
A small, portable inverter for EL wire. Powers off of 4 AAA batteries (not included!), it can drive 10 to 13 feet of our high-brightness EL wire or 1 meter of EL tape for about 7 hours. There is a switch for selecting steady/blink/off modes. Comes with four 2.5mm pitch female JST connectors, standard for all the EL wire and tape we carry. The JST cables snap into the inverter, so if you don’t need all 4 cables, you can use as few as you want. The inverter does not ‘sequence’ the 4 cables, so if you use ‘blink mode’ all the strands will blink at the same time.
You can plug any of our EL wire/tape into this inverter directly. To connect a ‘raw’ piece EL wire to this, you’ll want a male connector wire
The EL inverter requires a ‘load’ to stabilize itself. Do not run the inverter without at least 2 ft of EL wire attached! Otherwise the inverter can spike and damage itself
Like all inverters we’ve used, the 2000 Hz oscillation is slightly audible. To reduce the squeaking, we suggest opening up the case padding it with thick foam tape/weatherstripping. Squirting some hot glue around the capacitors may also help. We managed to get it silent this way.
Soldering to raw EL wire is a little tricky but luckily we wrote a detailed step-by-step tutorial! The tutorial also covers a lot of information about EL and how it works.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
Python for Microcontrollers — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: CircuitPython 8.1.0 and 8.2.0-beta0 out and so much more! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
1m, 400cm, 10-13 feet – I think you only missed mm and inches 🙂 Why not convert everything to one unit – makes it easier to compare…
hi lars, we’re working on a cool chart with this and we’re also updating things to be feet and meters only 🙂
Is this AAA or AA? The description says AAA, but the detailed copy has AA. Also, does this have the whine that is common in a lot of inverters?
Thanks.
hey! david, hit refresh! we had a typo, it’s AAA everywhere!