I picked up a small EL panel for a project that is coming up soon-ish, and it occurred to me that before I go ahead and install it, I should make sure that it works, and also figure out what side the light comes out of.
This sounds like something that should be an easy task, but it's actually a bit tricky because EL panels generally take a pretty high voltage and high frequency to actually turn on. Luckily I have a well equipped workshop.
So first things first: yes, the panel does work, and it emits light out of the white side, not the other side that looks a lot more like what light should come out of. Go figure.
To get things to glow (somewhat, at least), I used a multi-tapped 24v HVAC transformer, and fed a 400Hz sine wave into the low voltage side. In theory if I put 24v into it, I should get 240v out of the 240v tap.
Well, the first problem there is that my function generator can only put out 10v.
And the 10v is peak, not RMS.
And then on top of all that, most of the time these cheap transformers are over-wound so that the low voltage side actually puts out a fair bit more voltage than it's actually rated for, since the voltage tends to sag under load.
All this combined to make the output voltage only around 55v RMS, but it was apparently enough to still dimly illuminate the EL panel, so I guess in the end it did its job.
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