Why this exists.
The short version: closed-source consumer firing systems were too expensive, too compromised, and too fragile to outlive the company that made them. The long version is below.
Why
I got tired of paying $400 and up for closed-source wireless firing systems that compromised on features, locked their firmware down, and went quietly stale every couple of years. I'd been around rockets long enough to know what a sane firing-system lifecycle looked like — and the consumer pyro options weren't it.
Backyard Hero is built for the weekend pyro: not pros running 1.3G commercial shoots, but people who want a really good 1.4G show a few times a year, with all the parts that show actually needs. Rack design with fuse-burn math. Satellite-image field layouts with safety rings drawn at the correct distance. Beat-detected pyromusical timing. Live telemetry from every receiver. Sub-10 ms cross-receiver sync. Plus the parts the show doesn't need, but that you'd want anyway: shot profiles built from YouTube reference clips, cost-per-minute stats, cue sheets with photos of the actual shell next to the cue number.
The hardware is open. The firmware is open. The host app is open. There is no cloud login, no subscription, and no telemetry call-home. The system you have today is the system you'll have in five years — and if I get hit by a bus, you can keep using it.
Where it is
Current stage — 05.2026 semi-open testing. The system has run real shows and is open for people who want to build and run their own hardware now.
If you'd like to try it today, create a Contributor Portal account to view hardware resources, preview the web show editor and inventory tools, and request hardware. Current contributor hardware ships for free while testing is active. If you'd rather build it yourself, everything is in the public repository and the wiki.
How to help
Build it. Putting the system on a real field is the single most useful thing anyone can do. Bug reports from real shows beat anything I could ever write from imagination.
Send PRs. Firmware fixes, UI improvements, new enclosures, new protocols, better shell-tag parsing, better fuse-math — every PR makes the platform better for the next builder. The codebase isn't precious. If your improvement is good, it goes in.
Be cool. Read the disclaimers. Pyro is fun. It deserves respect, and so does the community of people who put on these shows.
Who
Backyard Hero is the work of ONESEVENTYFOUR — one person, working between shows. Aerospace brain, software day-job, opinions about RF design, and pyro spending habits that would make a financial planner cry. The maintainer is happy to share PCBs and design files with active contributors (at material cost) — collaboration on the hardware side is genuinely welcome.