EL- Wire Suit Design Help

Community Projects
1

Hello folks!

So I discovered Arduino and all that fun stuff from my brother, who had an arduino Uno (which I promptly “borrowed”).

After that, I began thinking of what I could do with it, and I settled on building an EL-Wire dance suit, which my friend would wear and dance in, and I’d run maintenance on.

So… “Why is a total n00b trying to build something so complex?” You may ask yourself… My answer, why not?

Anyway, there are three main aspects to this suit that I wanted to brainstorm in the forums for ideas, stress tests, and general fact checking (basically will it work and how do I do it).

  1. Wireless vs. Stand-Alone modes:

I’ve got two xbees, and an xbee board for lilypad. I wanted to known if it was at all possible to have the wearer choose between being wirelessly controlled (by me with a laptop off to the side) or in standalone mode, where he will be controlling set light modes via buttons on the suit.

  1. Different lighting modes:

This one I’ve already pretty much got figured out. I want the suit to have two different light modes, one with red and one with blue. This is pretty simple to achieve with two-circuit micro-relays, which the arduino can control pretty simply. One will control the power flow and the other will control which color set the power will flow to. So, either red or blue, and what rate they strobe at.

  1. Lastly, would be power supplies.

This seems to be the issue with any prototype or machine. How to get a solid amount of power, for a reasonable amount of time, and keep it light and compact. I’ve turned to the Lithium ion battery solution, in conjunction with the arduino LiPower board. The EL Wires have their own power packs and inverters, so that doesn’t become an issue.

Basically, I’m a hopeless noob to progrqmming, but I have a pretty good knowledge of electronics and I’m determined.

The materials I have to work with:

  • several strands of EL-Wire and EL-Tape

  • multiple (5) electrical inverters

  • arduino Lilypad main board

  • arduino Lilypad usb board

  • Arduino lilypad LiPower (power supply)

  • regular lilypad power packs

  • small button battery power packs

  • lilypad conductive thread

  • 2 Xbee Pro s

  • 1 Xbee explorer board

  • 1 xbee lilypad board

  • A computer (obviously)

  • several Lilypad LEDs

  • 7 RGB LEDs

  • 5 micro-relays (for el wire switching)

  • multiple small circuit boards

  • soldering kit and skills

  • absurd determination

Basically, the coding and layout are what I need help with. Xbee in particular is incredibly confusing to me.

Thanks guys!

2

You may want to look at this instead of all of the above.

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11323

Features:
ATmega 328p running at 8MHz, with Arduino bootloader
Eight opto-isolated, zero-crossing EL control channels
Headers for XBee and NRF24L01+ for optional wireless control
No library needed - control is as easy as turning a LED on and off
Integrated 1.5A linear regulator (LM317) to supply regulated DC power to external inverter
Linear regulator preset to 3.3V, but can be changed via PTH resistors, or bypassed entirely
Can be powered by a 3.7V Lipo battery (using 3V inverter), or an external 3.3V to 16V supply (using 3V or 12V inverter)
5V FTDI BOB or cable required for reprogramming, not included
External EL inverter required, not included

And while this tutorial is for the EL shield for an UNO, it’s also good reference for the above all-in-one EL Sequencer.

https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/353

3

Hm. That is actually a very good suggestion, but I’m not sure where the power for that will be coming from. I need to be able to run around 5 strands (that’s an exaggerated estimate) at any given time, and the product specifications state that anything nearing four will be pretty dim. I could bump the power to twelve volts, but what battery do you know that can pump that out consistently for more than 20 minutes? I don’t think dancing with an extension cord is too ideal :stuck_out_tongue:

4

I do however, like the any features it seems to provide, so perhaps I can run some of the main wires with this, and some others through my suggested relay system

5

Mstaffa81:
Hm. That is actually a very good suggestion, but I’m not sure where the power for that will be coming from. I need to be able to run around 5 strands (that’s an exaggerated estimate) at any given time, and the product specifications state that anything nearing four will be pretty dim. I could bump the power to twelve volts, but what battery do you know that can pump that out consistently for more than 20 minutes? I don’t think dancing with an extension cord is too ideal :stuck_out_tongue:

The question is what's the total length of your strands ? Your comments above are referring to the 3V inverter that SF sells ? So use the 12V inverter, which sounds like it'll run a lot of EL wire. Then you need a 3S LiPo (3 single cells in series so as to increase the voltage) or use a single cell LiPo with a boost (DC to DC) converter to step-up the voltage. The first may be simpler but you'll need a proper charger for the battery. I don't think SF sells either (3S battery w/balancing taps and charger) but they're available, look for stores selling RC plane "stuff".

The second means having a battery and DC-DC and then the inverter. And perhaps a separate (readily available) charger for the single cell LiPo. You might be able to get a combined charger/DC-DC board. If not Pololu sells small [DC-DC converters. The only question in my mind is how much 12V current does the inverter draw when running all your EL wire. That’s something you could easily measure (or perhaps e-mail SF tech support and ask them). I get conflicting answers as to how many mW/m EL wire consumes. The SF datasheet lists anywhere from 100 to 1000 mw/m. If you had five 3m lengths, that’s 45m and so somewhere between 4.5W to 45W. The latter would be a problem but the former is easy for a LiPo powered system.](Pololu Adjustable Boost Regulator 4-25V)

6

Each strand is 3m. Would perhaps shortening them accomplish a brighter light with less voltage? Since I don’t have the actual clothing yet (having trouble finding exactly what I would like), I’ve just been calculating for the full length

7

Shortening them will consume proportionally less power and thus increase the battery life. It may not make them much brighter, it depends on the inverter and how “taxed” it is driving the length. Since inverters generally don’t allow you a choice of voltage (it’s > 100 VRMS) it is what it is. Could you run a nominally 12 V inverter on less voltage, say 2 LiPos in series (~7.4 V), and have that work with a shorter lengths ? Good question, I don’t know. It would depend on the inverter design and I would guess there’s some min voltage input for it to work at all. E-mail SFE tech support with that question.

ps - one other thing to be aware of … some inverters do not like being disconnected from a load. They depend on some min length of EL wire being attached or else bad things happen. SF says theirs all operate w/o any load.

pps - It occurs to me that maybe, just maybe, if really needed, the EL Sequencer board could be modified to allow 2 inverters to be attached and to split/divide their outputs to go into different output channels. For instance channels A, B, C, and D could run off one inverter and E, F, G and H the other inverter. I’ll have to look at the board design and see if there’s a place where an easy cut w/an Exacto knife will do the trick.

8

I’m afraid my knowledge of electronics is somewhat limited with conversions and loads, especially when dealing with AC currents. A board with two driver inputs would be good, but inworry about the effects on some of its features

9

Well the 1’st thing to do is get a real good estimate on the total length of EL wire. Everything depends on that. No need to make things complicated if it’s not really needed.

FWIW here’s the kind of battery that should run one of SF’s [12 V inverters at it’s max power output (9W per the datasheet) for just under an hour. If that inverter can really drive 30 m of EL wire at your desired brightness and if you find 30 m is enough … then you’re all set.

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/10470

https://www.sparkfun.com/datasheets/Com … V12M-1.pdf](EL Inverter - 12v - COM-10469 - SparkFun Electronics)

10

Here’s some interesting data on power consumption. These people tested all the inverters they sell with the min and max lengths of EL wire allowed by the inverter specs. They used 3 different EL wire types. SF sells the 2.2 mm type and Adafruit sells both that and the brighter 2.6 mm type. They measured the input current drawn by the inverter for each case and computed the total power drawn from the source (wall-wart or battery). The data looks fairly consistent across all their 12V inverters, implying that they’re all about the same efficiency.

http://www.thatscoolwire.com/articleDet … ticleID=67

So for the “normal” EL wire, 104’ (31.7 m) required 3.36 W using a 12 V inverter. That would mean under 0.5 A for that 11.1 V battery above and a good 3.5 hours of run-time if you had 45 m of EL wire on all the time. Better than I had thought !

It also means that a small single cell LiPo combined w/the DC-DC converter linked to above is an option.

11

Wow! You’re really good at this XD

With that information, and an old jacket I have for a mock layout of the wire and all its lengths and the component layouts, I can probably get back with a good estimate of my power needs :3

12

Hey! So I’m working on that mock layout for the el wire lengths and such, but another thought occurred to me while I was drawing out the suits sketches. Can I have a pin on one lilypad turn on, while connected to a pin on a different lilypad, and have the receiving lilypad interpret that as a switch? It would free up a large number of pins if I had a different arduino controlling the LEDS, while the main board is controlling the EL Sequencer and other things

13

Mstaffa81:
Can I have a pin on one lilypad turn on, while connected to a pin on a different lilypad, and have the receiving lilypad interpret that as a switch? It would free up a large number of pins if I had a different arduino controlling the LEDS, while the main board is controlling the EL Sequencer and other things

Yes you could do that ... and more. You could use a single pin on each board to make a 1 direction UART, aka a serial link.

http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/SoftwareSerial

And send more data over the link than a single bit. Use another pin on each and the link can send and receive messages.

IIRC the “Arduino” on the EL Sequencer has 5 or so spare “analog” pins available and brought out to the header. Since analog pins can also be digital I/O pins I have to ask … do you really need another Arduino/LP mainboard ?

14

Oh, probably not, but it was just something that had crossed my mind

15

Hm. If I DID get the sequencer, I would want to use Xbee to control it with a program on a remote computer. Do you know anything about Xbee and how to do something like that?

16

Mstaffa81:
Hm. If I DID get the sequencer, I would want to use Xbee to control it with a program on a remote computer. Do you know anything about Xbee and how to do something like that?

I've not used an XBee but from what I've read, they're fairly simple to setup and use. The EL Sequencer has a socket for one and I think the general idea is that the XBee-XBee link is just set-up as an RF equivalent of a serial port. The "Arduino" on the EL_S doesn't really "know" the difference. XBee's are widely used and so I'd think there should be a lot of how-to info available on the WWW. For all I know SF might even have a tutorial on them in their tutorial section.
17

I’ve tried to follow the tutorials, but my knowledge of the serial libraries and their use in code is pretty limited. I also have no idea how to use a program to send commands via xbee and control pins. Xbee (or I should say serial connections) are a good bit foreign to me

18

Let me set aside the XBee for the moment and go 1 step further down the road. I assume you were going to have a PC connected, via a USB cable, to a “base station” XBee which then sends commands to the remote XBee and EL suit, telling it which EL wires are to be on and off ? Let’s assume that all works. How were you going to format and send the EL suit commands ? Did you have some program in mind that runs on the PC to do this task ?

19

Nnnnooo I’m afraid not.

20

Mstaffa81:
Nnnnooo I’m afraid not.

So what was "the plan" ? Other than to figure out if it could be done (it can !) and then how do how been it's done. (I think that sentence makes sense) :mrgreen:

A story if I may …

There are advant-garde (my terminology, for lack of better terms) dance troupes that use EL wire as part of their act. They have many dancers doing many different things on stage and yet it all must be choreographed to make the show successful. You can Google to see such dances/shows on YouTube. There is a existing protocol for show lighting and effects, called DMX, that has a lot of equipment and years of usage behind it. But it’s like killing a fly w/an atomic bomb for just a few dancers, each with a suit of 8 strands of EL wire. Still there are people who use DMX, originally a wired protocol, now extended over RF, to control such things.

As it happens there’s a very active Christmas lighting community and some of these people have lighting shows that would rival any pay-for light show. Perhaps you’ve seen them on TV. To serve these people some smart guy, no doubt one of them, came up with a PC program called Vixen (named for the obvious reason). I, ever so briefly, dabbled with the old version of Vixen (2.0) and found it, after some experimentation, easy to use to program complex lighting schemes. The new version, 3.0 last I checked, was not so easy to use (at least not worth my time at that time). In any case people were using Vixen to “talk” over RF (yes, among the various types were XBees !) to control X-mas lights far away on their property. There’s no reason that Vixen, old or new, couldn’t be used to talk over an XBee link to your EL suit. It might seem, at first, like using an A-bomb to kill a fly, and that might be the case, but the old version was easy to program a whole show in … so who cared.

To help a dance troupe, I wrote an Arduino program that took Vixen 2.0 serial data as input, perhaps from an XBee (that was their plan, I don’t know if that’s how they ended up doing it), and translated that data/commands stream into equivalent EL Sequencer commands, for up to 15 EL suits. You of course, only have one suit, and so would need a simpler version of that code. I’m not sure if the dance troupe I was helping ever used my code but I did have it working, as best as I could test, on an Arduino Uno. And so it should also work on an EL Sequencer … fed data from an XBee. But it’ll be some work for YOU to learn all this stuff.

Is this more than you wanted ? Or need ? Many people have made EL (or LED) suits that follow pre-programmed sequences of lights on/off. Then when they tired of those, they changed the onboard EL/LED programming to do some others. No Rf link needed. Certainly less effort and time than the above, if all you’ll ever do is a dozen or so EL sequences.

So how badly do you want/need the remote RF control ??? It can be done, though perhaps not simply.

In any case I’ll try to find that old thread here on the SF forums for you to read and I’ll try to locate, if I have it on this “newer” PC, the aforementioned Arduino code. It won’t help you with the XBee learning but it may be a piece placed in your puzzle of what to do.