From by Guy Winterbotham and Dave Tashner via hackster.io
This is a collaborative between a group of geeks with a shared interest in the practices surrounding DevOps practices related to continuous delivery. The goal is to create an internet connected device that can access the state of the deployment of an application from the “bare metal” provisioning of cloud VMs up through to the application build and deploy. It may end up as a limited edition.
Most control options and circuits involve creating an oscillation and running through a step transformer to get the 200V+ needed to get the wire to glow. One control approach like Spakfun’s SparkFun EL Escudo Dos have a single beefy low voltage power source and use high voltage triacs to route to multiple wires. I thought I’d like to get multiple 5V EL power supplies and use MOSFETs to control the low power side. Since I was going to experiment, I thought I start cheap and get the wearable versions. It turns out with some pocking around it was just as easy to hack the 3V controller without the use of a MOSFET.
I figured our that the small chip does two things. It debounces the pushbutton and based on how many times the pushbutton is pressed produces a couple of patterns. On, slow flash, fast flash and off. The pushbutton has an external pull resistor which makes the hack easy. Replace the pushbutton’s pull to ground with a microcontroller’s programmatic pull to ground. if both share a common ground this level shifting requires no other parts. There is some risk of oscillations and high voltage escaping back to the microcontroller but no more than the onboard controller chip.
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