Help: Electronic Firing Panel - Sequencer (For Fireworks)

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Simplest firing panel Iv'e seen was just a load of nails hammered into planks of wood. I'm not sure what actually set the fireworks going but it was powered by a 12V car battery. Each nail was wired to one or more fuses and the negatives all made common. To set off the fireworks somone sat there with a wire connected to the battery postitve and just touched it to each nail in turn.

Not really what you would call hi-tec, but seems a pretty effective way of sequencing even quite complex displays.
 
I would built a low frequency clock (possibly a CMOS 4060 with a 32768kHz crystal), then use a counter and connect some doide ANDs to the outputs to drive a buffer stage connected to the igniters. You could easilly use a 8-bit counter and 30*8 diodes connected to DIL switches to manually select which firework triggers when.

But if you want something more flexible and easier to build then go for a PIC but that's more Nigel's department than mine.
 
The charges are ignited by an "electronic match". It is a thin piece of nichrome wire that ignites a tiny bit of priming charge and that starts the main charge.

The typical "nail boards" are set off by a separate nail on a flexible lead hooked to the positive.

Now electronically, it's important to know just how many amps these things need to size the transistors and the driving voltage/current. You can use mosfet or bipolars. Heatsinking is not an issue because the loads are so brief.

I'd use a microcontroller myself. There are 40-pin ones which can meet your requirements.
 
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atlam said:
We have this policy that everything in our displays are made by us. But we never built this type of pannel and we never used one.

We can always buy one, but that is no fun and against our policy.
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Fair enough but no hardware setup with discrete component can offer such flexibility with variable timings you would require.

Some or all of you must start learning about microcontroller programming. With microcontroller, such sequential task is trival.
 
I will not give you the whole schematics, but i could give you some ideas. You could have a PIC wired into a transistor, witch will turn on a relay, then heat a coil, that has a fuse in it. Then when the transistor turns on, then the relay will get the coil RED HOT, and light the fuse. I have thought about this before, i think i will make something like this before Independence Day.
 
I was going to make something similar to this for this Independence Day, but some transistors failed to show up in time. I was going to have the computer send commands to the PIC so that my software could easily turn things on and off rather than the firmware.

@Marks256, I really think you could eliminate the relay. It would add a lot of board space and cost. It would be a lot better to use a power MOSFET or BJT.
 
Yes, but i literally have hundreds of relays, besides, wouldn't the relay give you more power options(amperage)?
 
That is pretty much how i am going to build mine, except, i will just have my laptop connected right to it, with no PIC.
 
Marks256 said:
That is pretty much how i am going to build mine, except, i will just have my laptop connected right to it, with no PIC.
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Advantage of using a PIC (or more than one) is that you only need a serial lead from the computer to the firing panel - so you can use a LONG cheap wire to keep well away, and also easily add more channels without altering anything else.
 
 
Yes, but i don't have any PICS. If you really wanted to use serial, then you could just use a shift register.
 
Marks256 said:
Yes, but i don't have any PICS. If you really wanted to use serial, then you could just use a shift register.
Click to expand...

Yes you could?, but it would be crude and MUCH poorer in features, and more complicated as well!.
 
I have an idea that beats electronics! Lighting them manually! It is cooler, funner, and more dangerous. Especially when they fall over!
 
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