EL Wire Angel Fish Neon Christmas Ornament by swirlingbrain

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

I saw a Neon Angel Fish and thought it would be cool to sort of reproduce it with electroluminescent wire and make a lighted Christmas Ornament. I add a different odd fish Christmas ornament on my Christmas Tree every year, so this would be my Christmas Ornament for this coming year. It looks a lot like Neon when lit up!
EL Wire can be bought on Ebay or AliExpress. EL Wire is about $3 a wire (1m) and about $5 for the driver. To have more than one color easily, a Y-splitter is also needed for about $4 or if you are really good, you can strip, solder, and heatshrink two color wires together. I tried it but the tiny corona wire breaks off really easily so I wouldn't recommend it but some people are able to do it. So 2 color wires, a splitter, and a driver is about $15 total (give or take). I got the USB end so I drive it from a USB charger but a AA battery pack driver can be found also. If you scour ebay and don't mind waiting a month for the delivery you might find the parts cheaper on Ebay or even AliExpress.
So I printed the fish and with my resin printer I hollowed the inside. I used clear resin. I added the wire and used a bit of super glue to glue the wire into the channel. My idea was to view the EL wire thru the clear resin printed part but then quickly realized the EL wire is viewed better from the exposed side. I then realized it would be good to drill some holes so I could string the wire thru it. I mean, I didn't need the holes before when wanting to view it thru the other side but viewing from the exposed side the holes makes sense for string the wire so added the holes. So in the resin printer software, hollow and punch drain holes form the solid side not the channel side so that the channel side (viewing side) looks nice.
So starting from the bottom whisker, the pink wire should go around the boarder, in and out of the tail holes and then tucked under the whisker. The blue wire should start at the back bottom zebra strip, then over to the next and finally to the eye and just wound and glued. The wire should be super glued about every inch or two just to hold it in place. The end of the wire that is cut off should be tucked under or else covered with e6000 glue or something like that to prevent shocks. The wires should be connected to the splitter and then the splitter connected to the driver circuit.
WARNING: The driver puts out high voltage (300v?) but with low amperage so you'd likely feel a shock but probably not die since the low amperage. But, I wouldn't try it to find out and possibly die! So be careful with the high voltage! Certainly don't lick on it!
Anyway, I accidentally bent the black part of the pink wire and broke the connection so it stopped working. ugg. So be careful with the connector wires. The EL wire can be bent a lot so it's not as much a problem as the black connection to the EL wire. I wish I would have know that. So I've reprinted the fish with stringing holes.
The EL wire that loops around on the back, you may wish to get some black enamel paint and paint over the EL wire to hide the light from shining through.
Anyway, if you don't want to make it a Christmas Ornament, you could also make a desk stand by adding a pedestool in Tinkercad or some such.
Other projects with this: I thought it might also be neato to make other designs such as a pineapple or a small restaurant open sign or other iconic neon name like CocaCola or something. With an Arduino and an EL Escudo Dos Shield board, some animated EL Wire (animated Neon looking) designs could be created or even a Nixie type clock thing (but it would be expensive since you'd need a few driver boards for that).