Rumfish.net:Featured article/July 2007

The goal of The Box is to achieve electrical ignition of fireworks with the intent of remotely controlling our annual forth of July Thunder over Flags Fork spectacular. We aim to use the basic principle that, if you pass too much current through a very fine wire, its resistance will be too high to conduct the load and the excess energy will be converted into heat. We didn't want to buy nichrome wire and make fancy igniters dipped in laquer so we used a single 6" strand of copper wire taken from 22 gauge stranded wire. In theory, after coiling nearly the entire length around a piece of visco fuse and short circuiting the wire with a car battery, the copper wire should glow orange and melt thus igniting the fuse.  This would be neat enough but, as the Knights of the Rumfish know, its all about a little something called the coolness factor.  Our ultimate desire was to wire up every firework on the field before the show and control them all from one control panel 100ft. away from the launch platforms.  I Zerm, the Rumfishian Empire's top electrical engineer, devised an incredible device.  It would end up being a dual four bit binary system capable of addressing 30 seperate ignition points and it would come to be known as "The Box."

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