In a word, no, due to the new triacs. From the comments ...
Ad | about 2 years ago
Do these improvements mean that this shield is able to reliably change the intensity of the EL wire? I read a lot of comments on the EL sequencer that seemed to say that the triacs would only PWM for so long before dying. I have a EL sequencer and am scared of attempting to PWM the triacs for this reason.
Also, how long do you think it will be before your UK distributors have these in stock?
MikeGrusin | about 2 years ago
TL;DR: The new design solves the dying triac problem, at the expense of continuous dimming.
The old design couldn’t enforce exactly when the AC could be switched on and off. This allowed continuous dimming, but because you could randomly switch in the middle of the AC waveform (where the voltages are largest), the parts could experience very large voltage transients. Not everyone had this issue, but a number of customers found that eventually these transients would kill the triacs.
The new design uses “zero-crossing” triacs, which means that if you turn them on or off, they will wait fractions of a millisecond until the AC waveform is at zero volts before switching. This makes everything electrically much quieter, and eliminates the possibility of damaging transients. We’ve found the board to be bulletproof in testing.
Unfortunately what you give up is continuous dimming - the triacs won’t let you turn them on and off in fractional amounts, so you’re limited to half-wave steps. We’ve found that you can still get several broad zones of stable dimming (say 6 or 8 steps from full-on to full-off), but intermediate PWM values will produce flickering (which is kind of cool too). The important thing is that you can’t hurt the board by doing any of this, so feel free to experiment and let us know what you find.
Our distributors order from us on their own, so you should check with them directly to see when they’ll have them in stock. Thanks and have fun!
Ad | about 2 years ago
Thanks for the quick and detailed reply. The 6 or 8 steps of dimming sounds like a good compromise if it’s guarenteed not to damage the board. I’ll hassle the UK distributors 
So aside from sync'ing to the input HV AC and removing 1/2cycles, people have chopped/PWM'ed the DC input to the inverter. This works w/some, but not all, inverters. Of course that type PWM is global, affecting all channels that are on.
