EL wire 4xAAA pocket inverter
36 units will be available shortly.
A small, portable inverter for EL wire. Powers off of 4 AAA batteries (not included!), it can drive 3-4 meters (10 to 13 feet) of our high-brightness EL wire OR 1 meter (3 feet) of EL tape OR a 10cmx10cm piece of EL panel 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.
There is a 1.7mm DC jack on the side so you can put in 5-6VDC to power this off of a different battery or power source, This cable has a matching DC plug on the end)
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.
Check out our EL TRON bag tutorial for ideas!
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.
The EL wire 4xAAA pocket inverter appears in the following collections:
