KFB's Canada Day Show

We dealt with Scott form Cobra as well as Ms. Lucy (lol) from Alibaba.com and managed to procure 1800 talon igniters.

Two words.....HOLY SHIT !!!

Some more software pics...

Damn looks like a nice show is going to be happening. I notice the icon for the software named KFBPyro? is this all custom software you wrote for your custom hardware? If so I would love to hear more about that.

Edit- When is this show? Anyway I could maybe come out and watch it? (or if you need any help, but I am a pretty big newbie) Richmond Hill is only about a 45 min drive for me.

Hey khogan. The show is being shot up north at a private cottage for that lake.  The show is sponsored by the Cottagers association rep for that lake.  I wouldn't feel right inviting people to the private location unfortunately.  But I very much appreciate the enthusiasm and offer for help.  Maybe at some point all us rookie pyros could get all of our collective shit together and put on a show together!  I could only imagine the sky carnage.

About the software and hardware.
The hardware is just manual push buttons running off of two car batteries (for the amps) wired out to 6 satellite boxes with 24 +/- terminals.  We did manage to build in a testing circuit.  When in test mode you can push the button on a fully wired talon igniter already clipped to a wick and the volt/curr isn't enough to light the wick but will light up a blinking light on the box.  That way once we're all ready to go we can verify a good circuit (manually of course) for each physical queue.
The software is very primitive at this point and does nothing but save, load, and play back *.kfb programme files. As the timer in the software runs a voice tells us which numeric queue to push.  When we connect the fireworks to their respective satellite boxes ( which are represented by their respective rows on the main firing board), we simply write the queue number in white board marker above the corresponding button.  So we figure out all the fireworks locations with their satellite before hand. So it's still a very manual process.  The software helps us fire at the right time to go with our music. 
The future plans for the software will be a timeline interface where a song can be loaded (or not if you don't want to do a pyro musical), and tabs can be set like chapter markers along the timeline which will represent a firing event.  Then each marker can be assigned to a physical terminal on one of the satellite boxes, and also be assigned to which firework will be shot from the queue.  Thsi would help with wick burn time predelay as well as air to to effect.  So if you want a menace in the sky at 11:20:15 you place a tab at that location on the timeline. Then using a couple drop down menus you select the satellite, the terminal, and the firework.  And the system will fire that menace 1.5 seconds ahead of time to account for burn and air times.  We figured some raspberry pies and and a local wi-fi LAN should do the trick.

looks like a nice show,where are you's doing it ?

Wow that's an impressive amount of work you guys did, especially with the video edits to see what it'll look like.

Sure hope I get to see some video after the 1st!

Good luck with the show

Here are some pics of our set up for our Canada Day show.  We had 9 stations across a 200ft lake frontage.  We took a whole bunch of fireworks apart so we could really time certain elements.  It's amazing how poorly the internal timing of cakes are. For example, we separated the final shot (a quick 5) in two greedy goblins from the first 20 single shots so we could nail the timing going into the operatic part of Bohemian Rhapsody (see video).  We had this section timed out so that based on the advertised time of the cake we should have been dead on but not leaving things to chance we separated the final shots.  On one of the cakes, the first 20 single shots out shot the expected time by 3 shots.  And in some cases we just wanted to see what an entire menace would look like all at the same time lol.

Nice job. timing was really good too especially considering you are using talons. Would love to see what you can do with some ematches. Around 4:45 you have some big willow effect, what is that?

Thanks that's what I figured it was, just wanted to confirm. Those are really nice.

@ khogan - Those shots you're referring too are Silver Palms from BEM. We only used 4 golden rain willows and they were right at the very end to thicken up the final shot. What would the timing difference be with using eMatches? Right now we're cutting right into the casings of all our fireworks and clipping the Talons right up against the first tube. I guess it would save a fraction of a second to poke the cake and use an eMatch. What I worry about is the first shop loosing compression because of the poked hole and the first shot doesn't get very high. We have a set of brass lolly pokes and have done tests with home made eMatches and that first shot didn't get too high. Plu sunless you know a guy with some "fell-off-the-truck" eMatches we'll be using Talons until we manage to get our supervisor cards lol.

The lake is called Cordova lake. It's about an hour past Peterborough up Hwy 7.