People from India must know what Sivakasi is famous for. Sivakasi a.k.a minijapan is the reason for skies being colorful on Diwali & Christmas nights. Yes, Sivakasi produces 90% of fireworks in and almost more than 40% in Asia. While China being the leader in fireworks manufacturing and their cost advantages had forced Sivakasi companies to open bases there. Ok, let's get down to what I call pyrotechnics 2.0. During final year in my college, an unusual request came through my dad from one of the pioneers of fireworks in India. They wanted to do a fireworks display from boats and they don't want to ignite manually. For starters, in India all the aerial firecrackers are still ignited manually by hand and there is always a fire hazard involved in it. Further since it's a display for a multinational CEO, they wanted to do it in a choreographed fashion. In 2005, there is no technology to do that in India. All we can do is that we can just ignite the shells and pray that it comes synchronized. But in developed countries, the electrical ignition technology is far advanced and they use array of computers to control the display It's a great engineering challenge for me as it requires skills in electrical, electronics and computer software to solve it. Information from web made clear that acquiring that technology from abroad is so costly and there is a service issue too. It's very clear that we are lagging in technology adoption and I quickly jumped into it with the hope that google will never disappoint in fetching information. Dad too promised that he can support the electrical engineering part of it The Research arm of that company was run by a brilliant chemistry professor of the town. He promised all support to go ahead and do that. The requirement is that there should be a controlled delay between firings, it should be highly scalable, failsafe and cheap. Our first challenge was to build a foolproof interface between the electrical system and the chemical system. An electrical squib is the device that does this job. We designed a simple system that activates the squib. The first squib we designed was a combination of electrical conductors and few chemicals. We failed terribly in our first test missing 9 out of 10 shots. It's very clear that the system driving the squib is perfect but the squib itself is not good. The chemicals are damaging the electrical conductor. Time is running out and each field test is very costly. I quickly turned to Google to fetch me the best practices in designing it. With the best practices in hand and I had understood that we need a indigenous solution as I had found that the squib is absorbing moisture from air as it is a rainy season. Worst of all the display is going to be from a boat in sea. We redesigned it and did a quick field test. In the field we had hit the magic percentile 100% for the number of shots successful. But in phase 1 of the development we couldn't reduce the setup time and the system was not failsafe enough. There is no redundancy if a channel fails. Above all the control panel is located within 100 meters of the shell stands. We decided to overcome all these pitfalls in the next hardware refresh
We developed a quick field guide on a single sheet to assist the people who operate it on the show day. The show was planned in a port city called Cochin and the guest of honor for the show is the CEO from an advertisement major. The pressure was on as we got only one chance to get it right. My friends from college agreed to accompany me and provide tech support. Since they were all are from electrical engineering department of my college, there is a lot interest in this project We spent a whole day on the boats and we are assisted by technicians & engineers from the research lab. We wired up for all the four boats and I had given a go ahead after verifying all the systems. We spotted few dolphins and it's the first time I had seen in Indian seas. We armed the system and waited for the go ahead from the shore. I was very anxious about the first shot to the sky. The walkie-talkie beeped and we got a go ahead to fire. The first shot was fired and there she goes. It was a perfect and we continued to fire. Something went wrong with one boat and there was nothing in the sky for few seconds. But another boat started firing and filled in the gap. We quickly figured out on what went wrong and fixed it on the fly.
To me the show was brilliant and orchestrated very well by the equipment. The sea was calm and the water glittered with colors. The show is a great success and it's a new era for pyrotechnics in India. Yes we did the first show fired using electrical ignition system in India from waters. The system was safer, reliable and above all it's in perfect control
After coming back from the field, I decided to improve the system further. I had developed a wireless system, a high voltage system and the number of channels were increased on our wired system. I had named the system as 'ETERNUS'. I quickly formed a single employee company called 'Srinivas Innovations' and it's the first in India to build, sell and consult on electrical firing. Later I had developed computer based choreography software along with necessary hardware. My brother who is also an electrical engineer helped me in architecting that.
IntelliFire V1 Software :
Till date we had sold nearly 50 Eternus systems and more than 2000 channels. Almost all the big fireworks company in Sivakasi owns an Eternus and the market almost saturated for another system. Further India is not ready for very advanced systems used in developed countries. The project had given me immense confidence in solving problems through engineering and very excited that I am an entrepreneur in my age of 24
After joining TCS, the development of next generation system was put on hold. The support for existing systems are still done by my dad's engineering firm.
My recent trip to Niagara and Disney changed my perception again. Disney Imagineering team fires using pneumatics and it's 60% less polluting that conventional fireworks. There are systems far advanced that they can control fire to 0.01th of a second and perfectly synchronized to music. Indian pyrotechnics is going through another transition and there will be a demand for advanced system in the future. An indigenous system is the key as the type of fireworks is different in India.
I had recently agreed to disrupt again with one of my friends who is running a fireworks company to develop an advanced computerized based system with music synchronization. The deal is that I will be architecting the system for fun but not for profit. The game plan is to develop a simple but advanced system to welcome the New Year
Watch the skies on the New Year eve if you are in Sivakasi!!
