Need technogeek help

[mattlistener]

So after seeing 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

Comments

[volta]

Without having seen it, it sounds like you had it wired up correctly and just got a faulty transformer. Either way, if the magic smoke came out, it is almost certainly dead. With luck, there will be markings on the blown transformer indicating what it should be outputting, so you can just find a replacement.

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.