Yep. The Whoa board can independently control and perform measurements on four channels!

The short answer is, probably around 10ft illuminated at once across all of the channels (using the integrated EL driver). Much more if powering the EL from an external power supply.

That said, it's difficult to give a good answer because there are many variables. EL wire can vary in power consumption by foot by 2x or more. Also, there is no hard cutoff, if you overload the driver on the Whoa Board, the wire will simply glow dimmer, until it reaches an unacceptable brightness level.

We tried many different integrated drivers, and this was the best one we could find (in terms of being quiet and driving the largest possible area).

The Whoa Board performs capacitive measurements on EL materials. EL materials are made up of two conducting planes which sandwich a phosphor layer that emits light when an alternating current is applied to the conducting plates.

The Whoa Board uses the conducting layers that are present in all EL materials to also perform capacitive measurements. Getting this to work reliably is a challenging electrical engineering problem, and it's taken us a year and 5 full design iterations to arrive at a sensor design stable enough to release into the world.

Arduino is a well established programming environment for controlling circuit boards. Arduino compatible means that programs that run on the Whoa Board can easily make use of a rich ecosystem of libraries to unlock a wide array of other functionalities.

The Whoa board takes inspiration from the design of Leah Buckley's Lilypad, and Adafruit's Flora, two well established boards optimized for prototyping wearable electronics. In this vein, the Whoa Board exposes sewable digital pins which can be used to communicate using three well established serial protocols: UART, I2C, and SPI

We are excited by the potential for touch or motion data to be sent to other devices.

Using the serial output lines, you can use the Whoa board in conjunction with a wifi, BLE, or XBee chip to communicate wirelessly however you want!

We have exposed a header that is drop in compatible with the ubiquitous NRF24 wireless transmitters. While we have gotten this working for ourselves, this feature is still unstable.

Approximately 30 x 70 mm. Smaller than a standard business card!

The Whoa board works from 3.3-6 volts, and accepts power via it's onboard micro-usb connector.

We recommend powering it from a lithium-ion cell phone recharger (so that you don't have to dispose of AA's after every use).

No - unless you want one. The Whoa board comes with a quiet EL driver built in, which is enough to comfortably drive most wearable projects and small panels.

For larger projects, our first stretch goal is to ship the Whoa Board with a physical switch that enables the board to power the EL elements from an external supply while still offering touch sensing and sequencing functionality.

We see a lot of potential for enabling touch sensitivity on larger projects, but it is worth noting that it's use will void the warranty (because failing to switch the switch, or using an input supply beyond 360V P-P will cause the board to short circuit).

It is our name for the technology we developed to perform capacitive measurements on materials being driven at voltages that a conventional IC’s wouldn't tolerate. Patent pending.

It does! We also hated that noise, and tried a number of different techniques for making EL glow to get rid of it. The whoa board features the quietest EL driver we could find, and we are quite satisfied with its performance.

Yes it can. We have the whoa board outputting something on the usb connector in it's default program, and will publish example sketches of alternatives in the main code repository.

Please! You'll need something that transforms the MIDI or keyboard triggers into sound though. Like a computer (mac or PC), or USB Synth.