[sdiy] Light Emitting Capacitors

[David Cornutt]

On Mar 9, 2006, at 7:41 PM, Tom Arnold wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 09, 2006 at 05:09:32PM -0600, phil macnutt wrote:
> Really looks like what we call EL lighting is actually LEC lighting.
>

Well, an EL device *is* a capacitor, as I understand it.
It uses an alternating electric field to kick some electrons up to
an energy state where they emit photons when the alternating
voltage crosses the x-axis, and the electrons drop back to
ground state.

Most of the EL driver circuits I've seen run between 500 Hz
and 4 KHz.  They *can* be driven off of 50/60 Hz line voltage,
but you don't get much light that way.