fun light play
So, just a fun little attempt demonstrating how well an El light shows through the skin. I've got some stuff coming up that should allow to place the wire subdermal pretty effortlessly. If my new gear comes in I'll be putting in a few more. These are transdermals and only good for around 3 to 7 days. if you're going to be at bdyhax and want a really cool but temporary set of lights pulsing in your arms, let me know.
Comments
Looks awesome, I won't lie. For me though, that's a lot of effort and potential infection risk for a 3-7 day mod... You do you though. Looks incredible.
Did you coat it with anything? How did you disinfect it?
I wonder how blue will look.
The reason for the short timing is because it's transdermal. I have an idea to work around this but not enough time to implement it.
Whoah! That's really intense. You should take a shot at night too.
I just want to add that the attached picture is the best summary of what a grinder is that I can imagine. you should turn that into business cards.
how about PTFE or FEP tubing? (especially since FEP should be heat-sealable and a think it's autocaveable too). Available for a reasonable penny from a variety of lab equipment suppliers. bola pops into my mind.
Just curious, how do you seal the PTFE?
Depends. In a simple case you can simply plug it with another piece of PTFE. I have seen pictures of PTFE tubing being clamped shut but I have no idea how they did it. That's one of the reasons why I also mentioned FEP as it works as thermoplast. So you could melt it or ultrasonic-weld or whatever you have available (hot irons and whatnot)
Now I do want to point out that while this looks cool, i can't see a way to make this totally subdermal as of yet and nothing is really new or awesome about it. I was actually trying out a method.. might as well have fun and make it glow right? In this case.. I kept the power supply in easy reach do I could yank it off with no effort. I'm not sure I'd want it subdermal.
I wouldn't worry so much about the power supply going subdermal. The fact that the whole system is working with rather high voltages would be more concerning and you seem to see no problem there. (with PTFE/FEP tubing and little chance to create a current path it's not even that unreasonable). Of course the power supply would need to supply a bit more power. Any measurements on how much Amps it draws from the battery (guess it's dual-AA so input voltage would be about 3V). Maybe we can design a custom supply and boost circuit with minimal control. Like a reed switch to power on and a very minimalistic inductive charging mechanism. If you are not in a rush, things can charge pretty safely.
If you intend to leave the power supply outside your body (which I agree with) you should get a magnetic power connection for the interface, to insure there isn't too much trauma from the power line. There are several that look small enough for that purpose on the market now. Unfortunately, the only ones commercially available seem to be the USB-C plugs.
The point is, the high voltage is required by the light element, not the supply. So whatever you do, you'd have that in your body. Cutting power off the system as in removing the external supply is one safe way. Cutting the power internally off the energy storage would be the other. Guess I'll have to dig around in my boxes to find some EL wire (still got some blue-ish colored).
Yet another way to make this a bit safer would be to monitor current flows. As these things operate with very low currents to begin with it should be rather easy to detect an increase of current by additional current pathes through the body. wrapping an additional wire-mesh around the el-wire (with the same potential as the outer-el-wire) and connecting this to the rest of the casing would increase safety further. As the entire high voltage part would be within a constant potential, shorting out in case of a failure of the el-wire. The wire-mesh doesn't need to be all that dense either, so it can let enough light through.
(Commenting so that I get notifications about this)
@chironex have you done any more work with your chitosan/hydroxyapatite coating? I remember you and glims were working on it last year. Was it declared a failure?
@countseven last time I checked they put it on the back burner, but I recently mad a collagen/chitosan/HA coating that worked one mice