I am wanting to turn on and off EL wire, which is a small wire that glows visible light when AC is applied to it, with arduino or an ATTiny85. The EL wire comes with a transformer that runs on 2 AA batteries. It outputs 140v AC. I bought a solid state relay, but it does not work as expected. No controller, just me touching the wire to activate the relay. The relay will turn the AC side on, but when removing the control wire (connect to ground) the relay stays on on the AC side and the EL wire does not turn off. The EL controller has a flash function and if I activate that all this works, as I suspect the flashing from the controller resets the relay, or something like that.
After a lot of searching, it sounds like the current I want to run on the AC side might be too low. Doesn’t make much sense to a noob, but I think that’s what is happening. The SSR uses the G3MB-202P and the data sheet shows a load current of 0.1 to 2 A and I measured the EL wire only using 7mA. One site said to put a resistor in parallel with the load. I tried a 10k but it did not work (nothing lit up, including one EL wire connected directly to the controller and not the relay.) I’m not sure how to calculate what I would need either, and I didn’t want to spend too much time with doing so as I know my limitations and didn’t want to do something bad.
Is there a better way to control a low power AC circuit? I tried a coil type relay and it works. Was just trying to get away from the noise it makes. Would be nice to get the SSR working as I bought an 8 channel SSR relay for this project.
After a lot of searching, it sounds like the current I want to run on the AC side might be too low. Doesn’t make much sense to a noob, but I think that’s what is happening. The SSR uses the G3MB-202P and the data sheet shows a load current of 0.1 to 2 A and I measured the EL wire only using 7mA. One site said to put a resistor in parallel with the load. I tried a 10k but it did not work (nothing lit up, including one EL wire connected directly to the controller and not the relay.) I’m not sure how to calculate what I would need either, and I didn’t want to spend too much time with doing so as I know my limitations and didn’t want to do something bad.
Is there a better way to control a low power AC circuit? I tried a coil type relay and it works. Was just trying to get away from the noise it makes. Would be nice to get the SSR working as I bought an 8 channel SSR relay for this project.