Carnegie Mellon's Masters of Flying Objects juggling club holds at least one night-juggling session each semester where jugglers make beautiful patterns with light up balls. My friend David and I wanted to have light up clubs this semester, so we decided to make our own light-up clubs.
We decided to use el-wire, as it would cover more are than a single LED and was readily available. After obtaining el wire and power from coolnean.com, we carefully soldered the el wire to headers and were able to connect the drivers to the wire.
We decided to velcro the wire and battery onto the clubs so that the wire could be easily removed. Initially we found the heavy batteries ruined the clubs balance, but after placing the batteries at the top of the handle (the club's center of gravity) were able to improve the club's weight distribution.
When actually juggling the clubs we unfortunately found that the batteries fell out quite a bit, and that dropping the clubs caused the battery cases to break. In the future it would be better to have lights that require smaller batteries (such as LEDs), and to put the batteries in places that are no likely to get hit often. We hope our next model (with LEDs) will be more robust than our first version.
Below is a video of the night juggling session we had, which includes some of the juggling clubs we made.
For more images of night juggling, go here.