Need technogeek help
Jan. 15th, 2007 11:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mattlistenerSo after seeing ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tcb's backpack nicely done up with lit elwire at Halloween, I went and bought myself some from xoxide.com. They didn't seem to sell a power source, so I separately bought a product identified as "12 VDC Battery pack for cold cathodes, LEDs, ELWIRE". It comes with a Molex connector, and the elwire from xoxide comes with a Molex connector, so I figured it'd be plug and play.
Once I had both in hand I plugged them together, and nothing happened. I shelved them for a while, came back to it today and had a closer look.
On closer inspection I saw that there were only two wires in use out of the four-port molex connector... and it was a different two wires on each side! So the elwire's wires were getting plugged into the two unused slots in the molex connector coming from the battery pack. This was the only orientation possible to connect them together.
I carefully took apart the battery pack's molex connector and moved its two wires to the other two slots. I lined it up so the red battery pack wire goes to the red elwire wire, and black to black. When I plugged them in, it worked -- the wire lit up nicely. However there was an edge-of-hearing whine coming from the black box that came attached to the elwire, and after about 5 seconds it gave off a little bang and a puff of smoke (meanwhile the wire continued to be just as lit as before). I disconnected immediately.
Can you tell from the above what happened, and what I should do next to get this working? I've confirmed that I did have red-to-red and black-to-black. I've also confirmed that all the batteries (8x AA) were aligned correctly, and that the red wire indeed goes to the positive terminal. Thanks...
tcb's backpack nicely done up with lit elwire at Halloween, I went and bought myself some from xoxide.com. They didn't seem to sell a power source, so I separately bought a product identified as "12 VDC Battery pack for cold cathodes, LEDs, ELWIRE". It comes with a Molex connector, and the elwire from xoxide comes with a Molex connector, so I figured it'd be plug and play.Once I had both in hand I plugged them together, and nothing happened. I shelved them for a while, came back to it today and had a closer look.
On closer inspection I saw that there were only two wires in use out of the four-port molex connector... and it was a different two wires on each side! So the elwire's wires were getting plugged into the two unused slots in the molex connector coming from the battery pack. This was the only orientation possible to connect them together.
I carefully took apart the battery pack's molex connector and moved its two wires to the other two slots. I lined it up so the red battery pack wire goes to the red elwire wire, and black to black. When I plugged them in, it worked -- the wire lit up nicely. However there was an edge-of-hearing whine coming from the black box that came attached to the elwire, and after about 5 seconds it gave off a little bang and a puff of smoke (meanwhile the wire continued to be just as lit as before). I disconnected immediately.
Can you tell from the above what happened, and what I should do next to get this working? I've confirmed that I did have red-to-red and black-to-black. I've also confirmed that all the batteries (8x AA) were aligned correctly, and that the red wire indeed goes to the positive terminal. Thanks...
no subject
Date: 2007-01-16 06:44 am (UTC)I do not know where I have my stash of elwire packed away right now (the transformer whine drives me crazy, so I rarely use it), but if memory serves the transformer I was using output something like 120VAC @ 1kHz. My understanding is that higher frequencies produce more light, but I have no idea what the limits of the useful range are. Power draw is usually very low, on the order of 1-2 mA/m, so you do not need a particularly robust transformer, though you might want one to avoid a repeat of this problem.