Reliable Wireless

Napa Valley Show
2004

Our Mission is not only to provide more cost effective electrically- based, wireless firing systems, but include bringing to market additional software tools for the explosives handling community in general, starting with Pyrotechnic Inventory Control and Tracking software as well as Pyrotechnic Personnel database and WEB-based ‘Search Engines’ for Pyrotechnicians qualified to operate in various parts, if not all, of the U.S. This system will also be of use to the Blasting Industry, which, though little known by the American Public at large, is a very large and highly competitive industry, with revenues well over an order of magnitude above that of the Pyrotechnic Industry.

Fundamentally, current systems fail because they’re tied into the antiquated model of master-slave controllers. This is the way it’s been done since the first pyro with a match was the master, and the fuse was the slave. These days the master is a switchboard or computer controller, but the slave is still an electric box attached to the igniter. When companies have tried to go wireless, this architecture works against them in every way. First, all existing “standard” wireless protocols work the same way as E-Mail does – it doesn’t matter when it gets there, as long as it gets there. This is fundamentally not true in fireworks. When it’s time to fire the shell, it has to happen on time, every time; but with a radio in the loop you can never, ever guarantee that there won’t be a spike of radio interference at that exact moment.

Then to make matters worse, as existing systems go to very high speed, expensive radio systems try to minimize the window where the RF interference could be a problem. But distances, reflections, and other radios in the same band all conspire to keep the problem alive no matter how much money is spent on improving a fundamentally bad radio platform.

Firelinx has developed, and filed patents for, a fundamentally different approach. Discarding the antiquated Master-Slave approach, our architecture puts a fully independent Master firing controller at each position the slaves used to occupy. This is known as Distributed Processing, and has been used successfully for years in scientific computing and embedded systems to break large intractable problems into smaller ones. Since each piece of the problem is smaller, it’s more reliable. The Master controllers are loaded with their individual portions of the entire show hours before firing, when it doesn’t matter if a few wireless packets get dropped. Their clocks are synchronized just before the show, again at a time that’s tolerant of radio interference, and then the final firing command is given – again, shortly before the show begins. Once armed and synchronized, all the independent Master controllers, wired directly to the igniters, now act perfectly in concert, firing from their internal clock instead of an external signal, completely indifferent to any radio interference that might occur.

This fundamental architectural change takes the wireless part of the system out of the critical path, and then everything else starts to work in our favor. We can use less expensive radios; we estimate the amount we spend per radio transceiver to be about $4, not hundreds. The system is more reliable, more fault tolerant, easier to use, and easier to maintain.

Because each module operates independently, they can fire the same cue at the same time; so long wiring runs are no longer necessary to join together product to be shot at the same time. The modules are intelligent, complete controllers in their own right. The Operator could use the modules with nothing more than a $1.00 switch from Radio Shack and still fire the show in an emergency. They’re rechargeable (the chargers are built into their travel cases), perform all internal self-tests, and automatically safe and discharge themselves when done. They’re secure from outside radio tampering or unauthorized access, work down to 40 degrees below zero, are waterproof, and can have a major explosion go off right next to them (not unheard of) without significant damage. There are no moving parts--not even switches to wear out or corrode.

Firelinx products range from the standard Command Module (user interface) and Firing Module to the Firefly, a small 4-cue module, and the FireLance, a high-power single shot module capable of igniting hundreds of simultaneous shells across a bridge or front.

With Firelinx, the change begins as soon as the technician begins to think about the next show. For the first time, carefully timed and choreographed segments of music and fireworks are reusable and portable. Instead of starting over from scratch every time, the technician can reuse songs that worked well before, download new songs from the Firelinx web site, and put complex shows together literally in an hour or two that used to take weeks to create and polish.

Countless hours are also spent planning the implementation of the show. Mortar positions have to be planned, wiring runs calculated, and the number of cues has to be constantly checked against the capabilities of the firing system. With Firelinx, autoplacement and optimization software borrowed from the Computer Aided Design (CAD) industry automates the bookkeeping to a few minutes, and then prints out all of the reports necessary to keep the build teams on track and on target. The system grows seamlessly from 4 cues to 40,000.

The choreography is by Bill Cook, and the “Hey Big Spender” number is courtesy of Firelinx.