EL Wire 12V Sound Activated Pocket Inverter

A small, portable inverter for EL wire with an audio input! This inverter has a little microphone and will light the connected EL according to the surrounding audio volume. Makes for an easy reactive project.

This inverter requires 12VDC input (it works great with our 8xAA battery holder) and it can drive 2-3 meters (7 to 10 feet) of our high-brightness EL wire OR 1 meter (3 feet) of EL tape OR a 10cmx10cm piece of EL panel continuously for about 48 hours (off of 4xAA's).

There is a switch for selecting steady/sound/off modes - steady is 'always on'. Comes with a single 2.5mm pitch female JST connectors, standard for all the EL wire and tape we carry. There's also two power wires, you'll need to connect these to a 12VDC power source. The white striped wire goes to +12V, the plain black wire goes to ground.

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 Adafruit's EL TRON bag tutorial for ideas, and their EL wire couch video too!

Soldering to raw EL wire is a little tricky but luckily Adafruit wrote a detailed step-by-step tutorial! The tutorial also covers a lot of information about EL and how it works.