"A switch and a battery I understand. I went to buy one of those automatic systems, and I lived through adding up the price, but then they told me that I needed to buy another firing controller and another copy of the software to make it work, just in case the first one failed - 'it's electronic, you see'. Does that make sense to anybody? That's where I walked. It'd better be simple and dependable as a switch and a battery, or count me out."

Reliability is not an optional component, nor one you should pay extra for. The Command Module starts with two computers, one for the radio and communications systems, and another for timing and control. Then we add two more - a backup computer for each function - so that if anything goes wrong the second computer will automatically take over. Some competitive systems suggest you buy a second master controller just in case there's trouble. We suggest you buy a better controller. Every major Firelinx sub-system has some kind of backup option. If the touch panel fails, you can hook a PC to the USB port to control the show, or you can just plug in our hand-control pickle switch and use it as a mouse. If the LCD fails completely, the PC is still an option. If the USB fails, there's RS-232. If the radios fail completely, you can use simple 24 ga. firing wire to interconnect the modules. If the entire Command Module gets run over by a bloody truck, you can still manually fire the show with a $1 switch from Radio Shack or a couple of bare wires. At the same time, we'll never overcharge you for our software. Multiple computers and users can share the same license within the same company.

"All I want is a wireless system I can really rely on, whether I'm out in the desert or at the waterfront. Nobody's shown me how that's possible. The worst place is the air show, the air is thick with RF traffic, radar, who-knows-what -- and it's got to work every time. "

Firelinx has developed and has applied for patents on our "Reliable Wireless" technology. It starts with the radio itself: We use Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum radio at the maximum transmission power allowed by the FCC to ensure the greatest range and reliability possible. More importantly, our technology provides automatic firing with zero latency, immune to RF interference or delays. We do this through a computer architecture called Distributed Processing. Other systems use an architecture called Master-Slave processing to shoot shows. In a master-slave system, the master alone contains all of the information about the show, and it tells the slave what and when to fire. This creates a communications bottleneck, which is visible when the Master tries to tell a large number of slaves what to do at the same time, like when firing a front. In wireless systems, this also puts the radio in the critical path; any latency or delay in the radio signal is a delay in the show. Any failure of the radio is a failure in the show. In distributed processing, every module in the field is a fully intelligent, independent master-firing controller, wired directly to the E-match. When their highly accurate internal clocks are synchronized, they act in concert to fire the show. This results in zero-latency firing, and any number of cues can fire truly simultaneously. More importantly, the radio is removed from the critical path, significantly increasing accuracy and reliability.

"The one time I tried a wireless system, I set everything up and then got no continuity test out of one module. It turned out I had it behind a pillar, and I had to run a cable out to that guy. For me, that made the entire exercise kind of pointless.  What can you do to fix that?"

Firelinx Wireless Bridge technology mixes wired and wireless operation together. Remember that each firing module is an independent, self-contained master-firing controller. That means it can act as a master, or as a radio repeater to connect and issue commands to other modules. So assume that you've got a module that's shadowed either by distance or an obstruction or both. In most cases, our auto-forwarding system will be able to transfer commands to that module from another, even if the Command Module can't reach it directly. In the off-chance that no one can reach the module via radio, you only need to run a wire (simple 24 ga. firing wire will do) from that module to the nearest module that has an RF link, not all the way back to the Command Module.

<< Back to Wishlist

[More Articles]