I've been slowly picking up electronics over the past year. At this year's Burning Man, 3 out of 5 EL wires broke on me. This time, instead of e-cycling them, I decided to use it as a learning opportunity.

If you've never done electronics before, SparkFun is a great resource. This video got me into it by finally understanding how to debug (like me learning about Firebug for the first time):

2017/10/11

The first step was isolating the problem. The EL wire I have is 1 circuit + battery holder and 1 wire which clips in.

I took 1 broken blue set and 1 working red set and tried different mix and match combinations:

• Red wire + red circuit - WORKS
• Blue wire + red circuit - WORKS
• Red wire + blue circuit - FAILURE
• Blue wire + blue circuit - FAILURE

That made it definitive that something in the blue circuit/batteries was broken. It was possible it was the batteries so I double checked:

• Blue circuit + blue batteries - FAILURE
• Red circuit + blue batteries - WORKS

Okay, now it's definitely the circuit

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Next, I wanted to keep on isolating the problem. I opened up both of the circuits and visually inspected them

There were no visually broken capacitors so maybe it was connectivity issue

I connected a multimeter to the ground terminal of where the circuit would be. Then poked around with the positive terminal on the rest of the board

Everything seemed connected on both boards

I couldn't figure out what was wrong

Then, I decided to connect to the button's solder points

Ah ha! It looked like the red circuit's button worked in any direction whereas blue's button only activated when pushed in a very specific corner

I put the blue circuit back together and pushed the blue button in its specific corner and it worked!

So the problem was most likely the broken button

I had only soldered once before this point and that was for jumper headers so I was taking things slow and stopped for the night

2017/10/22

The idea I had to verify the button truly was the problem was to replace it with wires as a proof of concept

As a result, I:

• Verified wires would fit through button's casing hole
• Desoldered the button
• Soldered in wires
• Reconstructured the chassis (so I could add batteries/power -- I don't have a power supply)
• Touched wires together

It worked!!

For double sanity, I hooked up the button to the multimeter and confirmed it only worked in the specific corner

Some time between 2017/10/22 and 2017/12/20

Now that the issue was identified, I decided to order replacement buttons

However, clearly this wasn't going to future proof the device from it breaking again

At the time, I thought the issue was the buttons being too tall so my solution was to buy a shorter button, hot glue it to the top of the case, and run wires to the PCB's holes

I'm still a little doubtful that that was the problem (e.g. could have been dust from Burning Man getting into the button's internal circuits)

So I might wind up taking even more precautions in the future (e.g. taping over the button's hole)

Anyway, at this point I bought momentary buttons to get started

2017/12/20

The buttons had arrived and I did a simple placement test to verify it would fit

2017/12/31

I hot glued a button to the top of the case

I verified its connectivity afterwards (e.g. heat could damage circuit)

Don't worry, I still went out on NYE ;)

2018/02/14

Another delay, this one was caused by wanting to buy a fume extractor and personal life

I also purchased a new soldering iron for better temperature control (Hakko Fx888-D is wonderful). My old solder was a Weller with no knobs, only a plug for the wall outlet

After they arrived, I desoldered the EL test wires

2018/02/19

The following is directly from my notes:

• Delay due to purchasing wire strippers and solid core wire (24 AWG from hardware store, couldn't find 22 AWG =(
• Learned to "wet" wires before soldering
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkjMK26ROcM
• Soldered wire to button
• Ran wires through holes
• Tried to solder again but the traces weren't accessible (soo much wicked off or burned over)
  • I now know how to deal with this (see Adafruit troubleshooting later on)
• Dropped temp to 650
• Soldered into alternative holes but those weren't connected to the proper traces
• Tried another board
• Desoldered button partially as well as snipped ends as well as broke physically
  • I was trying to avoid ruining traces. Unfortunately, I still did
• Soldered 1 wire fine but trouble with other one
  • Solder was getting onto wire but refusing to go on pad so it would stay on wire or iron
• Got frustrated multiple times
• Finally read through https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-guide-excellent-soldering/common-problems
• First tried isopropyl alcohol then soldering again
• No luck
• Got frustrated and read some more
• Tried scraping with knife and saw copper lead exposed as mentioned towards bottom of article
• Exposed enough copper lead and soldered to it
• Closed up case, inserted batteries, and pressed button
• LED was displaced so could barely see it
• Connected to EL wire
• IT FUCKING WORKS!!