Final Project: EL oh EL wired shoes (aka twingle toes)

For my final project I wanted to make use of something that I already own and utilize EL wire since it’s not really a common material. I found some green boots that I thrifted in the past and decided to spice them up with some graphic designs.

Materials:

Pink EL wires (amazon)
Green boots (thrifted)
Small silicone wires (provided)
conductive fabric (provided)

Unfortunately I was unable to capture a lot of pictures of my creation process but I can definitely inform you that it was an insane amount of trial and error. Working with EL wire that already has a detailed circuit was a challenge because this specific set of wires had three settings. First setting was solid on, second was slow blinking, and third was strobe lighting. I tried many different ways of bypassing the button and the light options and a lot of them didn’t work the way I wanted to. At one point, Was able to connect the wires to the button and the power source and have the lights turn on from the new circuit itself. The only problem was that the connection of the wires still created the three lighting options. My end goal is for the lights to only turn on a solid color and off when not connected.

After trying a lot of different options and stressfully getting help from Sabrina, we were able to figure out a solution

Shown below is the diagram of how the connection ended up working

We tested this out by using a lithium battery. That way I could later apply it to the battery pack

It’s kind of hard to see since we used like colors but the dark yellow was connected to the ground and the lighter yellow on the top was connected to the battery. the white is connected to the other end of the battery and would connect with the light yellow. The white clamp is connected to a green wire which was used to bypass the button circuit and gave me the ability to make the light turn on solid when connected and then off when not connected.

I then put the pack all together and glued it to the back of the boot. the green wires are in place of the clamps in the draft and they are connected to conductive fabric that would connect the two wires when the laces are tied.