80 cue ic firing circuit

[eb11]

here is a picture of the beginning of a 80 cue electronic firing circuit. the people over at electro tech chat helped me design it building 1 board right now to see how it works. if it works the way I hope it does I will build 3 more to control the other 3 80 shot racks that I have

[mike_au]

I can't quite make out the part numbers, I assume half of them are shift registers? What are the others? Do you have a link to the ETO thread?

 

EDIT: I think I found it, so it is a sequencer rather than a full blown firing system? What are you triggering it from?

Edited October 6, 2013 by mike_au

[eb11]

I have changed what I am doing started playing with the arduino and I have a program made doing testing with it I an still using 2803 ic chips to send 12v to the talons. I was going to trigger the above circuit from a 4014 counter to the decoders Edited October 6, 2013 by eb11

[mike_au]

Are you still planning on doing it as a sequencer? and if so, have you looked into matrix switching? If you use a high side switch to drive rows and a low side like the 2803 to drive columns then you can get rows*columns cues, so 3 chips with 8 outputs each would get you 8*16=128 cues, compared to the 10 chips for 80 cues using a 1-to-1 connection.

 

The down side is that you can only trigger multiple cues simultaneously if they happen to be in the same row or column, which isn't a problem for a sequencer since it only fires one at a time anyway and since the 2803 can't handle all of it's outputs running at max current simultaneously you are going to have to put some limitations in place.

 

My first firing system was based on high current mosfets so using matrix switching made it a lot cheaper. I'm now working on a version 2 which is a bit more flexible and will have individual FETs for each cue.

[eb11]

I have the arduino mega running 54 cues and the I am using more megas to talk to a master to fire the cues to what I program into it. the megas are driving the 2803 with 5v outputs and the 2803 are sending 12v to the talons. I want more control over what I am firing and when the sequencer I had set up did not give me much flexiblity

Edited October 7, 2013 by eb11

[mike_au]

So you're planning one uC per 54 cues? that seems like it would get expensive quite quickly

[eb11]

still cheaper than buying a system. the arduino cost me 60 dollars

[mike_au]

Fair enough, I guess it is only expensive compared to using the matrix set up, the one I'm building atm uses a high current FET per cue, so that will end up costing more than $60 for 80 cues

[eb11]

here are some pics of my 80 cue firing system I am building

[Bobosan]

Looking good, eb11.

[bugatti59]

good post, thanks!

[eb11]

i was able to make 4 of these controllers for a total of 480 cues i have now just made it so i can fire them to music using the arduino megas 13 of them to be exact and the vixen software. i will do some more testing and then if anyone interested i can post the code

[eb11]

pictures of rebuilt fireworks controller I use vixen software and shoot the fireworks to music

[Vega]

Me intera tu sistema de disparó

[Arthur]

Firing systems can be fun bench projects BUT... I have a matrix system that used sub-D connectors and the cable weighs enough to tilt the car -really good for 10 - 50 cues but after that it's hard going. I have wireless systems that do up to 20 cues each -much simpler and easier -all manual though.

I have a full digital system that does 64 cues per module, up to 255 modules per data line (and infinite data lines with repeaters) but it's only controllable from a computer.

 

It's always a matter of choosing the right one for the job in hand.