ThinkLearnDo
I bought a 5 pack of EL wire off of Ebay and tried it out. Overall it was awesome, just being able to create glowing shapes is a blast! I think my favorite one I've made so far is the first image, it's just a cool design.
However there are some limitations... The first problem is I can't bend the EL wire as tightly around the pegs as I want to. You can see in picture 3, thats me trying to bend it around a single peg. It doesn't work very well. From what I've read about EL wire, the thinner it is, the tighter you can bend it. So for Version 2, I'm going to try some thinner EL wire.
The next problem is I have to bring the glowing wires in from the edges of the board. You can see in the pictures I have the EL wires coming in from outside the board. For Version 2, I think I'm going to try drilling some holes in the board, allow me to bring in wires from underneath to make that less of a problem.
But all in all for a first attempt, it was fun!
Diego
PicTrance
Cool project and something I'd like to try when my kids are little older. On the ideas for version 2 perhaps you could add sleeving (like heat shrink sleeving) to the el wire to mask off the section as it comes onto the board from the side. My worry with coming through a hole in the board is the minimum bend radius of your el wire seems pretty big.