In his splendid role as Kaptin Scarlett the Wand Maker Chris Barnardo spent some time tarnishing a Kymera Wand so that it looks like it was made of ivory or bone.

He also offered use to use the images and text, so we’d love to quote from the instructables introduction:

This instructable will show you how to make (almost) anything look like old ivory or bone. The technique I have used is also called distressing. I am distressing (you might want to call it a creative hacking) my beloved Kymera Wand. However you got one, hacking a $90 gadget takes some guts, but I think the result speaks for itself and you end up taking something original and turning it into something completely unique.

Below you can see how the wand is transmogrified in 13 well documented steps from being your usual wooden colored magical instrument to an elegant creamy white beauty.

Please look at the instructable and comment and rate it or comment here. And spread the word, it is worthwhile.

Before starting you should perhaps consider the Chris’ last words:

At last it is time to remove the masking tape and review your handiwork.

Phew, either it looks fab or you have just ruined a hundred dollars of high tech wizardry. Perhaps it might have been better to practice on an old wooden spoon first. …

If you don’t like what you see, mask up and go back to step one and start again… remember as it says on the Kymera Wand manual…

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT.

Nach monatelanger Suche ist eine deutsche Abschrift des Kymera Zauberstab Handbuchs in den Ruinen eines alten Klosters entdeckt worden. Der Zauberstab-Macher Chris Barnardo hat sich dann daran gemacht, die alte Schriftrolle akribisch zu restaurieren.

Wir sind stolz die Replik dieser Restauration jetzt der Öffentlichkeit präsentieren zu können. Sie können eine hochauflösende Vorschau dieser Meisterleistung hier herunterladen.

Deutsches Zauberstab Handbuch

Wenn Sie in den nächsten Monaten einen Kymera Zauberstab erwerben erhalten Sie eine Original-Replik dieses seltenen Schriftstückes zu Ihrem Schmuckstück dazu.

P.S. Nur eine Sache erscheint uns seltsam. Der Inhalt der uralten Schriftrolle stimmt fast genau mit unserer Übersetzung des Original-Manuskripts überein. Wer weiss…

Hier auch noch einmal die Verweise auf die englischen und französischen Handbücher.

Eine schwedische Variante ist gerade in Vorbereitung.

A I recently learned that the wand makers also switched to an Apple, I thought that a blog post about using the Kymera wand with your Mac would be appropriate.

As most of you know all Macs come with an IR port that can be controlled with the Apple Remote. And as this is just another remote control you can teach your Kymera Wand the codes quite easily.

That is enough to control the basic functions of your Mac with the Kymera Wand. Using the wand you have FrontRow, DVD-Player, Keynote, iTunes and volumne control at your command.

I show some of this in the youtube video I made on the first evening after I received my wand.

There have been some issues with the IR support on the new Mac Book Pros running Snow Leopard but I’ll come to this later.

To make the most of your ability to charm your Mac it is useful to get a fine grained control over what happens at each of the remote codes that is received.

To do this you can use an application like Mira or RemoteBuddy that allows to select for each application a different set of behaviors on the reception of the 6 IR signals. E.g. navigating your web browser, reading your Preview files or controlling VLC or whatever you’d like to do.

They also allow to change the global effects of remote codes and offer specialized menus for easy application switching and much more.

Here is a screenshot of Mira’s control panel

And here one of RemoteBuddy’s Control Center

As I had some issues with the Snow Leopard running on my MBP the guys from TwistedMelon pointed me to the free CandelAIR IR-driver from iospirit (RemoteBuddy) that replaces the Apple one and runs more stable and also just works.

Controlling Keynote with your Kymera Wand is especially tempting as you can show off with your wand at the event your presenting at. I did so at the JAOO software development conference in Aarhus, Denmark.

If your feeling like it you can also do your homegrown solution using AppleScript to decode and send the events you’d like to anywhere in the system. Andreas Rothaug did just that and documented and filmed his solution on his blog.

Apple ‘Magic Wand’ Remote System – homebuilt from kame anderson on Vimeo.

The code looks something like this (full script at his site):

on kymera(gesture)
--say gesture
if gesture is "swing" then
tvpower()
end if
if gesture is "up" then
tell application "System Events"
key code 53
end tell
end if


On the Topic of How to Program your Kymera Wand, forum user Gautam/omarahum did a nice printout sheet.

Had some free time, so decided I would try and figure out what functions I really needed to program into the wand and which I could leave out. It took a lot of tries to figure what wand gesture I should pair with what function so I made a little Jpg that lists all the gestures so I could print it out and keep the pairings straight. Thought it might be useful to others too so I decided to post it. Listed are the wand gestures, and next to it in parentheses is the number of pulses that correlates to the gesture, and space to write down what you’ve programmed.

Happy Casting!

Gautam

Thanks a lot

Michael

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

_________________
Richard Blakesley
The Wand Company Ltd

Wandmaker Richard Blakesley commented on Virgin Cable Remote problems of a forum user:

There are a few different types of Virgin Media remote controls, and some of them use alternating infra-red (IR) codes which are different with each button press – these are sometimes known as “toggle codes”, and are intended to avoid multiple commands being executed accidentally if the IR beam is broken during transmission (by the cat or your wife walking between the remote control and the Virgin box).

So, the first time you press the “channel up” button (for example, though this also applies to most of the buttons), it will send one IR code (let’s call it “code A”, which will repeat for as long as you hold the button down), but the next time you press the same button, it will send a second IR code (B). On the third press, you’ll be back to the first code A again, and so on. The Virgin box will action a channel change when it sees code A, but it won’t change the channel again if another code A is received consecutively, but is instead waiting to receive code B before it’ll change channel in the same direction.

The wand can only learn the IR code it sees when the button is pressed once during learning mode, which will be either code A or code B. So, repeated gestures will send the same IR code each time, and that causes the problem you’re experiencing.

Fortunately, there is a work-around:

• Whilst the set-top box is expecting to see A,B,A,B for repeated channel up (and, say, C,D,C,D for channel down), putting any other IR code in between the repeated A’s will also work OK (e.g. A,X,A,X for two channel up changes, or C,X,C,X for two channel down changes).
• An undocumented feature of the wand is that you can actually learn more than one remote control button onto each gesture (as a kind of macro) if you press two buttons in quick succession whilst the wand is doing the fast pulsing during learning mode.
• Therefore if you first press the button that you want to use (e.g. channel up) and then quickly press another button which has no effect (e.g. the yellow button on the Virgin remote does nothing most of the time), then the wand will learn two IR codes (e.g A,X) onto that gesture.

Now when you perform repeated gestures for channel up (e.g. flick upwards), the Virgin box will receive code A (to change the channel up), then code X (which will do nothing but make it forget that it had just received code A), then the next code A (on the next flick upwards) should cause the channel to change again as expected. We’ve tested the wand with two different Virgin boxes – on the first one it didn’t use these “toggle” codes so there was no issue, but for the second box we had to do this workaround, then everything worked fine. It might take you a couple of attempts to get the timing right for learning the “macro” of two buttons onto each gesture, but it’s not too difficult once you get the hang of it.

Sorry for such a long-winded explanation – I hope it all makes sense, but please let us know if not.

Cheers,

Richard

_________________
Richard Blakesley
The Wand Company Ltd

As several wand owners asked about it and I published the information as a sidenote in a blog post some time ago, it is here more prominently.

I also added it to the online manual.

Resetting the wand

1. go into learning mode (double tap while pointing upwards)
2. do any gesture
3. when the quick pulses start
4. do a big swish
5. there should be a big pulse as confirmation
6. done, all programmed codes gone

Merry Christmas and Lots of fun with your Kymera Wand

Michael

The guys from getdigital produced a nice product video of the wand controlling an audio-system. Thanks alot.

They show on/off (big swish), skipping (left, right), volume control (turn), eject cd (pull), switching sources (tap).

Have fun watching it.

They also added a cute picture of the wandmaker Chris Barnardo bespelling you with the Kymera Wand.

Chris Barnardo holding Kymera Wand

Nach ein paar Stunden Nachtarbeit, ist es nun geschafft, die deutsche Übersetzung des Handbuchs des magischen Kymera Zauberstabs ist online.

Bald wird dieser Text auf auch als wunderschön gedruckte Variante vorliegen, die wir dann unseren Kunden beilegen.