Started by sewing the EL wire design onto the jacket. The wool was easy to poke a hole into and pass the wire through. The holes did not tear, which is very nice. I tacked the wire into place with a couple of loops of thread. To make square corners (see the radio on the back of the jacket, for example), I found it best to pass the wire through a hole and then make a single loop inside the jacket so that when the wire was passed back out the same hole it was pointed in the desired direction.

The front of the jacket had in white EL the letters CNR and in red EL the letter E (CNRE is the project we worked on together). The back of the jacket has a radio outlined in green EL, a blue EL antenna, and yellow EL "radio waves".

To be safe, I sewed a liner into the jacket. That plus the heavy wool makes it a very, very warm thing to wear.

The pockets in the front of the jacket are lined and a convenient place for the electronics. The EL sequencer and inverter plus battery pack fits in one and the Arduino-based sound system and battery pack fit in the other.

The EL sequencer is straightforward to set up and program. A ground line and digital signal line connected it with the Arduino sound system so that the sound and EL sequences could be coordinated.

The Arduino sound card was constructed using a prototyping shield and the SOMO-14D sound module (that is sadly retired on SF now). I added an LM386N amplifier circuit, and it should be noted that it's best to go to the National (now TI) app note in its datasheet since the SOMO-14D schematic is incorrect. The key is to have lots of capacitance to knock down any Arduino-induced noise.

As shown in the photo, the prototyping card also supported a DIN connector that included the audio output to a speaker, 5V, and a switch cct (gnd+sense) that led to a speaker and ultimately a "kill switch".

The speaker was re-purposed from an old Motorola hands-free set. It is a unit with a housing that included a decent speaker, power ccts, and amplification. A coiled cord ran out one end to an auto lighter adapter and a second coiled cord ran to a jack I assume was for a phone. I snipped the lighter adapter cord near the far end and added a stereo jack for the 5V and switch sense cct. I snipped the other cord near its end and wired up a DIN plug to carry the audio, 5V, and switch cct. This was matched to the jack on the Arduino prototyping board.

The kill switch was constructed using a short piece of 1.5" ABS plumbing tube and two end caps. Through one end cap I ran a multi-wire cord that carried 5V and the switch cct; to the other end I connected a stereo plug to match the jack described above. An LED-illuminated toggle switch was mounted in the other end cap and connected to the 5V and switch cct. The final touch was to give the ABS a wrap with copper foil, just to make it shiny.

The Arduino was programmed to cycle through the sound files on the SD card mounted on the SOMO-14D. Each time a file is selected, a pulse was sent to the EL sequencer to coordinate the "light show effect". The Arduino also monitored the switch cct status and used a state change as a trigger to load the next file. Thus, there was no "kill switch" on the awesomeness.