I'm looking for some inverter designs to drive EL wire (ie
http://www.coolneon.com, www.coolight.com, etc)  Something more elegant
and controllable than driving the input of a commercial inverter, I
guess.  Note that the EL wire likes something like 120VRMS at 2kHz,
which is a
lot different than the 160V P-P at 400Hz that flat el panels seem to
like, which is where all the chip manufacturers (sipex, micrel, etcZ)
aim their special purpose EL drivers.

Looking at the special purpose drivers, they ALMOST look like something
where you could substitute a PIC and some high-voltage transistors.
They have a more-or-less conventional step-up switching converter that
generates about 80v, and then a HV H-bridge that drives the el-panel in
push-pull fashion to get the 160Vp-p.  I MIGHT be able to do that with
a PIC.  What are the normal limits on how high a voltage you can get
out of a step-up converter, anyway?

Alternate designs using an actual transformer would be welcome, but
it's gotta be a commonly-available or easilly-wound sort of thing.  I
assume the commercial inverters happen in big enough quantities that
they just use conventional single-transistor inverters with customer
transformers.

Thanks for any advice or suggestions...

BillW

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