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San Diego's Fireworks Show Over In 15 Seconds
First time accepted submitter fotoguzzi writes "Garden State Fireworks is investigating how the entire Fourth of July show was launched after a signal was sent to the barges that would set the timing for the rest of the show after the introduction. Can anyone suggest how such a trivial step could go so disastrously wrong?" It's not the first time such a thing has happened, either.
But what an awesome 15 seconds that must have been!
But what an awesome 15 seconds that must have been!
Yep, just like my first time ... she didn't seem to think so though.
My work here is dung.
...premature Californication....
I hear that happens to every fireworks show at some point in its life. It just needs to relax, take some stress off and not worry about how it performs. Just enjoy the show.
The idea sounds awesome. The videos look awesome. They've all had probably a once in a lifetime experience. And the one guy in the article was complaining about having to pay for parking?
Now I know how my wife feels.
One possibility is that the show was run by SMPTE timecode and someone mistakenly either started the code at a late point in the show causing the firing system to "catch up". Another possibility is the timecode was played back at fast forward instead of normal speed.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-15611160
I'd rather watch these short ones than be stood out in the rain (England) for hours.
...for fireworks to be like that, just constant rockets and explosions non-stop for 10-20 minutes. Why do fireworks shows limit their bursts to a Grand Finale?
Put me in charge of destroying money like this, and I'll create a number of bursts that keep you watching for the entire show, leading up to a ridiculous ending worthy of shore shelling from the Iowa.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
Ok! Ok! I must have, I must have put a decimal point in the wrong place
or something. Shit. I always do that. I always mess up some mundane
detail.
You could eat a 20lb sack of potatoes over the same timeframes. How does that not get better as time reduces?
The shorter the time frame, the more entertaining it is to watch someone try and devour 20lb of... well, anything.
Otherwise, why bother timing eating contests?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Maybe the timings were in milliseconds instead of seconds (or a new version of the software suddenly thought they were). Now, 30 minutes of fireworks gets done in 1.8 seconds. But since fuses take a couple seconds and some are longer than others, you get a total of 15 seconds.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Don't do that. No one reads the comment subjects. When you stick the whole message there, you just look like an idiot.
. . . or it was an Imperial Units / Metric System mix up again.
Metric System: meters per second.
Imperial Units: furloughs per fortnight.
I always buy Metric System fireworks . . . that go up to 11.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
When I was in college I saw something similar. It was a sticky hot 4th of July evening. Just as the show was starting a big thunderstorm moved in. When they shot the first couple of rockets up, big flashes of lightning arced through the clouds in response. It was pretty impressive. They decided to shoot everything off at once, one after another; fireworks, thunder claps, lightning, all at once. It was totally awesome. Then it started to rain and all the braless coeds in tee-shirts had to walk back to campus. One of the better displays I've ever seen.
Well.....
There we go. That's more accurate, lol. I think "ruining the show" is a bit harsh :-P
By the way...
What ****ing planet is this person from?! It is NOT COLD in San Diego at the moment at any time of day.
Not always. Most customers (the folks who pay for the shows) want the longest show for the least money. I've worked show where we were launching one shell every three seconds in order to meet the show duration requested by the customer. Think this turned a nice 5 minute show into a painful 30 minute experience.
How does is not get better as the time reduces?
As time reduces you approach what we call a sky puke. Okay it's a lotta boom but, you really don't get to see much.
Outsourcing?
The easy solution is to have 30x as many fireworks and then run it at this speed all the time.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
(Submitter here.) I should have put quote marks around the portion of the sentence about signals and introductions. I meant to, but after multiple previews I still forgot. It took me fifteen seconds to submit this story....
Their they're doing there hair.
Electric matches on the circuits take 5 milliamps to ignite them.
After the fireworks are loaded and wired up, testing is done to identify matches that aren't wired up right. Is there a chance that the testing process failed. On computer systems, it is pretty automated and happens fast. If the test resistor wasn't in the circuit properly, it might look like that.
Notes
I am a BATF licensed pryotechnician.
I assist with a small show every year (our last night went flawlessly)
I have never worked with a computer fired circuit
Leper! Outcast! Unclean!
Meriadoc Brandybuck, and Peregrin Took - I might have known!
I am officially gone from
Among the accomplishments listed on the Garden State Fireworks (pyrotechnics company responsible for the show) web site:
Statue of Liberty Bicentennial Celebration
That time, they managed to shoot off the show a whole century early!
I have designed the electronics and software of a fireworks firing system for a company that does regular shows here in Catalonia/Spain.
Believe me, experienced people are very cautious in everything they do, but unexperienced people can make big mistakes if they are overconfident in a black box system that will do everything for them.
In one point specifications said:
-The firing system must make an autotest for each circuit for the team to check all connections are in place.
They test the firing circuits of the fireworks several times before the show to fire all the material. In our case it was done exciting the fuses (sorry I'm not native english) with a safe very low current to see if the fuse is electrically present, and the inspections does a check of a circuit every 0.05s, so you can check the entire show in a few seconds.
For me this seems the check was done with full current on the circuits which fired all the fireworks during this test procedure.
It's quite surprising to have someone design a system that lets this happen from my point of view, in our case we made the circuits impossible (due hardware to redundant hardware switches and circuits) to excite to fire during the test (there are various physical limiter).
So... it seems someone who had not enought experience with fireworks managed to build his system and convince this people to use it... but its surprising, it's a pretty conservative people, at least the ones I know.
A am a pryotechnician that works exclusively with computer fired shows. From what I'm hearing on the mailing lists so far, they were using the Fire One controller. We also use them (we have over 100 modules at $795 each). I haven't been involved in the "Loading" of the show into the embedded controller for the past few years, but I was called into action about 3 years ago when we had the same problem with our "semi automatic" shows (press a button for each event). I found there was an additional step when downloading the show from the PC to the firing controller called "Assign Delays" that had to be manually entered when loading. Without that step, all shells for each event fired immediately. I don't know if Fire One ever fixed it because it's now part of our written checklist for loading and we haven't had a problem since, and Fire One is notorious for fixing a problem with one customer, updating the firrmware but not telling the rest of their customer base that there is an update.
If you are using Fire One, you can thank me for the new Line receivers in the new modules, I had to go to the plant and show them the problem.
It was most likely just due to turning off the test mode. They were probably doing a last minute quick test to get the order correct. And forgot to put it into production delayed mode.
Ah - those sweet computers.
Which brings up an issue I have with modern fireworks displays. In our community, they have a pretty big fireworks display on the 4th. Big enough that people come from fairly far away to see it. They have been trying to outdo their selves every year, so what was once a really nice fireworks show is now a VIP Pass and pay-for event, synchronized with radio, computer controlled extravaganza that takes hours to get out of, so half the people try to leave while the display is still going on. All those headlights do not add to the ambiance, rest assured. They have had computer problems also, having to restart the show, ans restarting some of the tunes to re-synchronize. As a joke, I noted that it was probably a acrobat reader, or HP printer update.
Coupled with the "We are so damned great and awesome" ads and news stories for it, the whole event has become more of an ordeal than enjoyable.
Then a year or two ago, I happened upon a private fireworks display with a couple families and their children. A few hundred rockets, and the children playing with sparklers. Completely hand done, no synchronized music or anything. I enjoyed that a whole lot more than the "Bigger and better than last year" events by a long shot. Since then, I seek out the small shows.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
We watched two more displays (yawn) and you know the only one anybody is talking about? Yup, the one that all went off at the same time. You know which ones I'll be telling as a great story for years to come? Yup, the one that screwed up. Do you think anybody cares what the Sea World fireworks looked like July 4 2012? No, no they don't. Hell, I forgot them 10 minutes after they were finished.
The screw up was fantastic to watch and I'll still tell people about it years later: "Ever wonder what it would look and sound like if they all went off at the same time? Been there, witnessed that."
So it sucks people paid to park and sat in the chilly evening, but c'mon, now you have a great story. Nobody would care to hear about the fireworks if they had worked!