Wandmaker Richard Blakesley commented on forum users that are having problems getting the wand to work.

Hello.

Sorry for the trouble you’ve been having – it sounds most likely that you haven’t quite got the hang of the gestures yet. In case you haven’t seen them already, we’ve put some short video clips of each gesture on our website to help show you how to perform the gestures – see http://www.thewandcompany.com/Manual.html and click on the typewriter-style buttons. Also, a few hints that might help:

• If you’re having trouble, stop and hold the wand steady and horizontal for a couple of seconds before trying again.
• Waving the wand more vigorously doesn’t tend to work well – short, positive movements are best.
• For the rotation gestures, you need to rotate the wand very slowly and smoothly one quarter-turn, keeping the tip steady. Once you’ve gone just over a quarter-turn, the wand will register the rotation and go into fine-resolution rotation mode, where it will register an event every 15 degrees – this allows you to control the volume with only small movements of your wrist.

There are a few videos on YouTube that might be helpful too:

• practising with the wand
• programming the wand
• using the wand
• a video made by one of our German resellers
• an example of controlling a TV and set-top box with the wand

Once you get the hang of it, you should find that the gestures are quite straightforward to perform, but it is like an instrument requiring dexterity, it takes a bit of practice to get used to it. If you’ve already learned some IR codes onto the wand, then it would be a good idea to do a factory reset to put in back into full practice mode, as Michael suggested :

• Put the wand into learning mode (point upwards and double tap)
• Do any gesture to make it start the rapid pulsing
• Instead of sending it some IR from a regular remote, do the “big swish” gesture while the rapid pulsing is going on
• The wand will do a few fast strong pulses to acknowledge the erase request, then the same again shortly afterwards to confirm that erase is complete.
• Take the wand out of learning mode (point downwards and tap)
• The wand will now be back to its factory-default state, in full “practice mode” for every gesture.

I hope that helps, but do let us know if you’re still having any problems.

Cheers,

Richard

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Richard Blakesley
The Wand Company Ltd