Firelinx was featured in the June 2005
issue of American Fireworks News
A conversation
with David Russell and Larry Mattingly of Firelinx,
Inc:
Q: Ok, let's start with the
Big Question: Why does the industry need another
firing system?
David: You sound like
Larry when I first approached him. It
seems somebody comes out with another firing
system almost every week. If Firelinx was just
another one, we would agree with you, but Firelinx
is a true technological breakthrough; it's a
full generation ahead of anything else available
to the industry.
Q: How so?
David: Reliable Wireless
for starters. Wireless has seen a resurgence
in the last two to three years; it seems everyone's
got something. Our primary concern was that
people were throwing radios into their systems
without doing proper research into why wireless
had failed before. We were right. Radio
Frequency or "RF" communications are fundamentally
flawed when used in pyrotechnic systems. It's
impossible to make an RF system totally reliable.
The more you try, the more expensive it gets.
An entirely new architecture called "Distributed
Processing" makes the firing system reliable
even when the radio is not. Our other breakthroughs
are in making the system work at extreme temperatures
like 40 degrees below zero, and in using state-of-the-art
SEPIC charge pumps to power the E-Match drivers.
Q: I'm almost sorry I asked!
You used a lot of terms I don't think many people
are familiar with. Can you simplify that a little?
David: Of course. In
fact, I'll be giving two seminars at PGI in
August on Capacitive Discharge and Wireless
Fundamentals, specifically to explain how this
next-generation technology works in simple terms.
But to give you the short version, almost every
firing system uses what's known as Master-Slave
architecture. The Master firing controller has
all of the information about the show and what
fires when, and it tells the slave firing module
out in the field when to fire its cues.
When this is done with cables, it's a simple
and efficient method for handling the problem,
but when you put a radio between the Master
and the Slave, it's no longer reliable. Let
me put it another way: Imagine you're testing
the main cable between your firing panel and
the firing modules/connector slats out in the
field.When you do the cable test, the lights
blink intermittently, showing there's a fault
in the cable. You wouldn't say, "Oh, it works
most of the time, we'll use it", you'd go to
the truck and get a working cable. The wireless
industry is asking you to do just that: use
an intermittent, unreliable link. If the radio
is in the critical path, then a delay in the
radio is a delay in the show. A failure of the
radio is a failure of the show.
Larry: "Distributed
Processing" turns the whole scenario around.
In our Patent Pending system instead of one
Master controller and slaves in the field, every
firing module out in the field is a complete,
independent Master firing controller. There
are no slaves. Before the show starts, each
Master is loaded with the part of the show it
will fire, and then their clocks are exactly
synchronized. Once synchronized, each independent
firing module works in concert, as part of the
whole. This fundamental breakthrough removes
the radio from the critical path, and makes
the whole system completely reliable, no matter
what's happening in the RF spectrum around you.
Q: David, you mentioned several
times now that RF is fundamentally unreliable.
That seems to fly in the face of several manufacturers'
claims. Isn't this just your marketing spin?
David: Hardly. I think
everyone's initial skepticism about wireless
has been well founded, from the early systems
in the last generation that failed miserably,
to today's systems. Radios today are certainly
improved over the last generation, but even
with Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum technology,
interference is still incurred by blocked channels,
random interference, microwave ovens, other
radios - the list is endless. With spread spectrum
technology all of these sources of interference,
rather than completely blocking the signal,
cause delays. These delays cannot be
predicted and they can add up to significant
time. As to other manufacturers, just try to
pin them down on the maximum latency of the
signal, and see what they say. In fact, Dan
Barker and Ken Schroyer of PMI - the makers
of FireOne, recently gave a seminar at the 8th
International Symposium on Fireworks in Shiga
Japan, specifically talking about the lack of
operational reliability in wireless systems.
The industry has worked hard at wireless, and
now it's recognizing the fundamental flaws.
Firelinx has developed a solution.
Q: The other term you mentioned
was Septic?
David: Close, it's
an acronym, SEPIC. The short version is that
it means a safer, more reliable charging system
for capacitive discharge firing. To put it simply,
you want to use a charge pump so that you can
have smaller, lighter batteries to power the
firing modules. With every module having it's
own rechargeable battery, there's no limit to
how many modules can operate together in the
show. Charge pumps aren't new, they're used
in a number of systems, but their danger is
that even if the charge pump is off, it allows
some charge to transfer from the battery to
the capacitors. This creates what we call a
Single Point Failure or SPF. An SPF occurs when
the failure of one component can result in charge
being delivered to the E-Match when it's not
expected. That can be dangerous. A SEPIC
charge pump isolates the battery from the capacitors,
so that it takes three simultaneous failures
in the system before charge can be released.
The SEPIC charge pump is so fast that in the
show, the user could fire a cue every two-tenths
of a second without ever draining the capacitors,
and it can fire 160 Amperes at once. At 30 volts
on the capacitors, that's enough to fire 480
simultaneous E-Matches. Then with micro-second
synchronization between modules, it's now possible
to fire literally thousands of simultaneous
matches in a front, or split cues to simplify
wiring. Once you solve the fundamental problems,
everything just gets easier and less expensive.
Q: I was going to get to that.
When you said you've got Master firing
systems at every position in the field, I see
in my mind huge firing panels all over the place.
This has got to be expensive. I've seen some
foreign systems that approach this level of
functionality come in over $100,000.
David: Technology keeps
getting cheaper. Name any piece of electronics
that hasn't dropped by at least half in the
last three years. Firelinx uses 100%
solid-state circuitry. There are no switches
to wear out, no relays, no little hexadecimal
thumbwheel thingies. There are, however, two
complete computer systems in every firing module
and six in the Command Module.
Larry: The final result
is that the cost is less than or comparable
to other professional level systems without
wireless, and significantly less expensive
than other wireless systems. Add to that the
fact that it works,
and it's arguably a bargain.
David: Put all
of the technological advances in chips together,
and you get a Master-firing controller in about
the size of a 5" cube.
Q: You just mentioned a Command
Module. What's that?
David: With an array
of potentially hundreds or even a thousand firing
modules out in the field, you need some way
for the user to talk to them. He can't go out
there and flick switches on 500 field modules.
The Command Module is just that - a simple user
interface that takes the user's commands and
makes sure they get to the firing modules. It's
totally portable, with a 5.7" LCD Touch screen
for the user interface. It's very sexy.
Q: And six computers?
David: When we started
this research, I asked Larry to give me a "wish
list" of everything he wanted in a firing system,
including everything that he could think of
that pyros dream about having in a firing system.
Larry: That was his
first mistake. After I compiled my list, I polled
a group of other long-time professional pyros
and they added a few items. It was a very long
list.
David: Oh, yeah.
You should have seen that list. The end result
was, I called them back two weeks later and
said, "OK, you get it all." It's too much to
go into here, but one of their concerns over
using more complex electronics was reliability
- what happens, for example, if the computer
chip goes out? Do they need to have another
laptop standing by, or worse yet buy another
Command Module just in case the first one goes
blip?
So we built the Command
Module with a complete set of backups. There
are two complete radio systems and two complete
computer systems so that if one fails, the other
automatically takes over. There are backups
on practically everything.
Q: So this all sounds good
on paper, but do you really expect everyone
to run out and junk all their old equipment
for this, even if it is a breakthrough?
David: No, of
course not, let's be real about the industry.
Sure, there will be some number who are ready
to buy, or are perhaps on a waiting list for
another system, and they can switch over to
us easily. Our plan, however, is to make Firelinx
both affordable and useful as an upgrade to
their current systems. Nobody has to throw anything
away, although the urge to do so might grow
stronger after a few shows. Did I mention that
each firing module is a complete Master firing
controller? You can actually have a complete
working manual system with just one Firing module.
That makes it practically the least expensive
introductory system on the market. Then you
can add more modules and then a Command Module
to go to automatic firing and real choreography.
You can take your current system, which might
be limited to 144 cues or 20 firing modules,
and Firelinx will work with that system to expand
it. We not only have the only connector system
that's field repairable if it's damaged, but
you can select whether you put a 50-pin Centronics
connector that's compatible with most older
slats, a 36-pin Centronics that's FireOne(TM)
compatible, or a DB-25 that's compatible with
ATF (Advanced Technique Firework) slats.
Q: Wait a minute, ATF works
quite differently than PMI's system. How can
you be compatible with both?
David: That's the beauty
of packaging all those computers into one little
box. Not only will it work with both systems,
but it's also directly compatible with MagicFire(TM)
timing squibs. No extra adapter modules required.
Q: But the firing system's
only half the solution. What about doing the
choreography?
David: You're right.
All that hardware is no better than a nail board
if you can't do a good choreography. The Firelinx
system has available a complete suite of modestly-priced
software customized to make use of the system's
wide array of features. For example, you can
now reuse an individual song from one show in
another at a later time. Besides the choreography,
there's complete site planning software to organize
building the show. The software even understands
how much charge is taken off the caps every
time it's fired, and how fast it recharges,
so it can automatically vary the width of the
firing pulse from 20 to 50 milliseconds. That's
almost five times the firing power going to
the E-Match as other systems. That can be critical
if you like to wire things in parallel or you're
considering using Chinese E-Match. It can also
automatically split the cue wiring up to use
all the modules, simplifying the wiring considerably.
The software will even output a voice-synthesized
beep track for your manual firing system as
well as our own timing sync track on the CD.
Q: I guess the last
thing everyone needs to know is where to get
one.
Larry: Thanks for asking. Come
see us at PGI or contact us at www.Firelinx.us
