most wireless systems are poopoo .. I’ve shot the keyfob one from china and a couple others.. wireless technology is ultimately compromised by RF or other transmissions that are common with a large event (eg. fireworks display)

Personally, I prefer to touch the probe to the pins … It’s a much more gratifying experience anyway…

Dumb, dumb, dumb!

and for the detonator take one end of a wire, wrap it in a perfect sized amount of loose (seperated to spread apart) steel wool, put that in a section of cut drinking straw, push another wire into the oposite end, tape wire ends to starw on outside for quick interchange of detonators, then pinch one end off and tape it, fill the whole thing with small fireworks powder, seal other end an voila- it makes a pretty good bang on its own- especially if you compact then press paper wads against the second end.

And i dont find steel wool at all unreliable, as the powder in this thing sifts through it, the finest stuff becomes 1st to contact the sparks- making it very effective, in the center of a pipe bomb this is a cool device.

Take it from me – I thought it’d be a great fourth of july stunt to make a loud noise using some black powder. I thought I was better than the explosive because my wireless detonator had good design (not enabled until 30 seconds after power on, specific remote sequence), but something went wrong, it went off in my face, and now I have eight less fingers than I did before that brilliant idea.

Seriously folks, some people WILL get the idea that devices such as these make high explosives “safer” somehow because you’re supposed to be miles away when you trigger it. Freak accidents DO happen and when it comes to explosives you can’t afford it. I hope those of you reading this will keep this in mind when coming up with ideas for entertaining your guests with pyrotechnics.

Combined with the homemade e-matches this can go very-very-very wrong. Looks nice though ;-)

ps: Milling blackpowder??????WTF?????DON’T DO THAT!!!! I hope the article means the components…

If you really want to make these matches just use some normal crackers, they are fairly safe to open and provide enough to make lots and lots of these, you don’t need much blackpowder anyway…selfmade most of the time isn’t worth the effort (and the danger), you have to build a ball mill, get the ingredients and spend hours to get it right. Wasted time/money if all you need are some gramms………..

Oh, and safety Sam says:
* Wear goggles so you can enjoy your eyes if something lights accidently and burning chunks of blackpowder go airborne.
* When messing with dissolver do it outside or with the windows wide open. The evaporation aren’t healthy and might be flamable if the concentration is high enough.
* Beware the carpet, static e is your enemy.
* Blackpowder might ignite due to friction, be aware of that. If you ever get to the idea you have to compress bp DON’T rub it around.
* Last but definetly not least: Check the legal situation in your country before messing with fireworks…@my place (germany) creating this e-fuses would be illegal. Hell, even opening the cracker is a violation of explosives law. The certified (legal) e-fuses/fuses are quite expensive but at least they are guaranteed to stand a certain current for a certain time so they won’t light due to static electricity, induction or something else Murphy might think about. When it comes down to paying some bucks extra or (maybe) hurting somebody while messing with selfmade stuff………….anyway, just have respect when handling with explosives and highly flamable stuff. Thousand times nothing happens and then somebody gets hurt because you thought you had to save some $.

Anyway. If you are adequately carefull when messing with them fireworks are great fun ;-)

@Larry
Here in the states we do have many dmx and other digitally controlled pyro systems that we use but every one that I have ever used has an e-stop somewhere in a controllers hands.

http://godlovesmeat.com/spatulatzar/wireless_detonator/

His homemade electric matches are brilliant, but milling the black powder seems very dangerous. (Yes, he took good precautions, but still…) I wonder if he could purchase finer grained powder? (I’d personally rather spend nice, safe money on model rocket igniters.)