I am looking into creating an EL wire project for my classroom so we can easily see when someone is draping a cable across the dark classroom. As I showed the project to one of our members, they instantly said, “We should totally put this on our robot.” So, I am wondering, do think this would be legal? I know the 100v AC seems like a non-starter, but if you look at the requirements a bit closer, it should be doable with the proper inverter. Anyway, what do you think? I am tossing this in chitchat as this is definitely not a necessity, but cool projects bring forth innovation and inspiration.
This would run afoul of R203 item “i” in the blue box.
2 Likes
And R614. Sounds cool, though. It’s given me some ideas for costumes.
1 Like
Thank you. I knew it was somewhere. So, if theoretically it was not green and could work with fewer than 24 volts, the AC conversion is not an issue?
Is the Phosphorus considered a hazardous material?
I was also wondering about a driver’s station.
Also, on re-reading R614, what is a passive electrical system?
Yep, sadly EL wire inherently requires very high voltage and low power AC. We had an EE mentor poke around for some workarounds, and asked some of the higher ranking inspectors at champs iirc, but there’s not currently a legal way to implement that.
There are now some LED products that closely mimic the look (appears as a continuous strand and not individual lights on tape) that may be worth looking in to.
2 Likes
Correct!
OBTW, if you run a brushless motor at 3600rpm, it’s being driven with [really noisy] 60Hz AC.
1 Like
I would stick to LEDs - even if there was a weirdly low voltage AC EL wire that was legal, it is just much easier to get LEDs to work since they are very happy running off of low voltage DC systems like FRC robots already have. You can get LEDs that mimic the effect of EL wire if you must have that continuous tube.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.