Fireworks are the best part about the Fourth of July and other celebrations, but they can easily cause accidental injuries. It's both safer and more fun to set them off remotely, so we'll hack some standard fireworks with nichrome wire, a relay, and an Arduino to ignite remotely over Wi-Fi using any smartphone or computer.
Why Launch Fireworks Remotely?
While fireworks are a lot of fun, they can also pose a real danger if they go off too early or in an unexpected fashion. By lighting fireworks remotely, a misfire shouldn't have any severe consequences aside from damaging your alligator clips or an inexpensive microcontroller.
Besides being safer to launch, remotely setting off fireworks allows anyone with a Wi-Fi-enabled device to take part in the launch without needing to be close enough to injure themselves. Even tiny children can tap on a tablet to set off massive fireworks, and the risk of messing things up would be merely inconvenient.
Finally, launching fireworks remotely also allows us to automate the launch by writing programs to do the firing for us. That means we can time when we want a firework to go off precisely or coordinate the launch for groups of different fireworks to create unique patterns and effects.
While the process of modifying fireworks to launch electrically does come with some risks, such as measuring the connectivity and working with voltage, it also makes the process of launching fireworks more automated and less prone to error. While it's not faster due to the time needed to load a firework and test the conductivity, it does allow more control and flexibility with the type of firework used and their placement.
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