Pyrotechnic Innovations

This is a short description of our legacy firing system. See our modern firing system, and/or purchase a complete set of firing system plans to build your own!

My Legacy 400 Shot System
My 400 shot firing system is the one that I most commonly use at all of my electrically fired shows. It utilizes a simple analog circuit with a built in continuity check. There are 200 separate copper contacts on the firing panel. When ever a contact is touched by the stylus (similar to a pen), that cue will fire. For the 400 shots, there are 8 separate slave modules, each of which has the capability to fire 50 shots. I have two kinds of slave modules; the box kind (seen in the pictures below) and the strip kind (not shown). The box is self explanatory, and the strips simply consist of a cable with connectors at every 10.5"'s along the cable (used for shooting shows with mortar lines). Most firing systems similar to the one I just described have one of two disadvantages. They either use 5 of the conductors in the firing cable as a ground (which will eliminate 5 cues from each slave for a total of 40 fewer cues), or they will have a ground terminal on each slave in which you will have to run ground wire back to the firing system from each slave (wastes a lot of time and wire). So I designed my system to eliminate both of those problems. It uses a ground terminal on each slave. This allows me to utilize all 50 conductors for actual shots in each firing cable without wasting a bunch of wire each time. With the flip of a switch on the firing panel, the contacts go from being able to fire shots 1 through 200 to being able to fire 201 through 400. This way, only half the space is used on the firing panel that would otherwise be needed for 400 shots (reverse polarity protection diodes prevent any sneak circuits from occurring in this type of system). See our modern electrical firing technology.