Igniting a Programmed Fireworks Display?

seg9585 asks: "I am interested in setting up a programmable fireworks display this New Years, and I was wondering if anyone from the Slashdot community had any advice as to how to set one up easily, inexpensively, and safely by someone with little experience with electronics/wiring. I do have a VEX controller which I can use for digital output, but I would rather not have to buy a ton of relays and create a spark by just shorting out the circuit. Is there a better way to do this?"

Comments

I saw a television special once.

[FooAtWFU]

There was a television special once - you know the kind, Discovery Channel or TLC or some such - on some fireworks experts. They were putting together a big display, something like the Washington, DC 4th of July fireworks, to be accompanied with some fancy-schmancy concert. After all the choreography business, and setting up the pyrotechnics, they wired it back to a control panel.

Now, this control panel wasn't actually your typical doohickey with buttons. It had a rows upon rows of exposed metal contacts (little stubs of wire sticking up vertically), and the guy in charge would activate them, one at a time, by touching them to a little hand-held device that I assume was wired up to the ignition current. I think he even had sheet music.

At first I wondered, "how disappointingly low-tech". But consider: you're dealing with pyrotechnics here. If it just takes a little current to ignite the high explosives, then you really don't want to hook everything up to an electrical circuit, microcontroller, electronics, any of that business. You keep the circuit open, until you're ready to close it. And if something goes terribly wrong, you really, really don't want anything to keep igniting rockets until you push a button to turn it off. You want to be able to just stop.

In summary, hands-free control is just not the way to go when dealing with pyrotechnics.