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

Two English inventors first to market with buttonless remote control

Kymera Magic Wand within its exclusive Box

Two English inventors, Chris Barnardo and Richard Blakesley are leading the way in a remote control revolution that will have users controlling their home entertainment systems with natural and intuitive gestures instead of button presses.

Developed over the last two years, the Kymera Wand is the latest consumer electronics gadget to employ emerging motion detection technology to give the user a richer and more intuitive user interface. Technically the Kymera Wand is a universal remote control, but as Chris Barnardo explains, that that was not what was originally intended by the design.

“Essentially we set out to design a magic wand that uses modern remote control technology to give the user a magical experience.” Says Barnardo.

“The result not only delivers a magical experience but is the first gesture based remote control that doesn’t have any buttons,” Barnardo adds.

Both the packaging and website have also been very carefully designed to be part of the fantasy experience. Visiting the non-traditional website is like a voyage of discovery, and opening the Chic black Kymera Wand box for the first time and seeing the dark brown, elegant wand cradled in its luxurious silk brocade, certainly does set the heart racing. But don’t be fooled, the old fashioned look and feel of the wand hides a highly advanced piece of technology.

The wand understands 13 different movement “gestures”, each of which can learn and replay the remote control function from any button on almost any existing infra-red (IR) remote control. All of which means that the Kymera Wand can be used not just for changing channels on your TV but for controlling hi-fis, DVD players, set-top boxes, iPod docks, Apple Macs and even remote-controlled light switches and curtains for example.

Techno magic

Kymera Wand Rear View

The technology that powers the wand is based on science, but it is so advanced and so miniaturised that it might as well be magic.

Based on the advances in motion sensing, the accelerometer that tells the wand’s microprocessor how hard it is and in which direction accelerating was originally developed for use in cars. These tiny silicon architectures are microscopically small but can detect the force of gravity even at rest. They are the sort of thing that detects if you are slowing down very rapidly in a traffic accident and signals for the airbag to deploy, or you’ll find them in mobile phones and cameras telling the device which way up to put the picture.

The wand has a special three axis accelerometer that can measure the g force in x-y-and –z. Using this information, and constantly updating the programme for the orientation of the wand, a special program on the onboard microprocessor can tell how the wand is being moved about.

Using some clever maths the microprocessor determines if the move made by the wand bearer was a deliberate on and if so, whether or not it was one of the predefined gestures programmed into it at manufacture. If it recognises the gesture then the wand’s microprocessor plays back the infra red remote code that it has been taught by the user to associate with that gesture.

A very small vibration motor similar to that found in a mobile phone gently pulses inside the wand to give what is called haptic feedback to the user so that they know that the wand has understood the gesture and has emitted an infrared remote control code.

The whole assembly is squeezed into the shape of a wand, and put together so that there are no visible seams and no unsightly screws to give the game away and that’s it, the Kymera Wand.

It’s simple really.

Spin back 50 or 100 years and what the wand does would have been real magic, but if you spin back a further 200 years it’s likely you would have been burnt at the stake for using the Kymera Wand. But then you wouldn’t have had a 72inch plasma screen to magically control.

© C.Barnardo The Wand Company 2009

WandMaker Chris Barnardo’s thoughts can now also be listened to at this stream of twittering messages. So now there is a second source to listen to besides the kymerawand mumblings.

He also put new gorgeous pictures of the Wand online on the Gallery. These should make your eyes gleam with greed and your mouth watery.

Photo Plate taken of the Kymera Wand

Update: I added the twitter stream of the wandmakers to this site in the sidebar at the lower right.

People have been asking how we thought up the name Kymera and where it comes from.

Well, right from the start, we wanted to give the wand a proper name
rather than a rather boring title of what it was. That is, we didn’t
really want to call it “Magic Wand” for example. The Kymera is all
about fantasy and making that fantasy real for everyone using modern
technology. I drew inspiration from the name of the sword that Bilbo
uses in Lord of the Rings, called “Sting”. It is such an evocative
name that really describes the sword and what it stands for.

For our wand we wanted something powerful and also with a meaning that
tied in with what it was. The name Kymera is a version of the more
traditional spelling of the word Chimera. This change in spelling
allows us to register the name and make it ours. As Chimera (or thus
in our case Kymera) is typically a mythical creature made from two or
more other creatures.

Two of the dictionary definitions of Chimera are as follows:

chi⋅me⋅ra (actually pronounced as we spell it with the K)

1. a mythological, fire-breathing monster, commonly represented with a
   lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail.
2. an organism composed of two or more genetically distinct tissues,
   as an organism that is partly male and partly female, or an
   artificially produced individual having tissues of several species.

The wand is a cunning blend of old fashioned quality of ownership and
design, packed with very hi-tech modern sensors and intelligence,
hence the name Kymera.

I hope that this gives you a little bit more of an insight into the Kymera Wand.

Even the wand dimensions are designed to be magic. As we all know, prime
numbers are magical mathematical stepping stones to a higher dimension. So
it follows that the wand was designed around these magical principles.

The overall length of the wand is designed to be 353mm (the 71st prime
number),
the wand breaks down into three sections (three is a prime), the shaft, the
crisscross (magical engine) area and the handle body and they are 173mm,
79mm and 101mm, respectively – themselves all prime numbers.

You know something magical has to come of it.

Cheers

Chris

Original Design

Here is one of the early concept sketches of the wand. All the basic
features were there from the start.

The aim of the design was to provide balance in the hand and a good
weight distribution.

The look had to borrow cues from Victoriana, so
that the finished item looked and felt like something that you really
wanted to touch and hold and to keep.

The design had to give a clue about the magic that was within.

Of course the design also had to house all the necessary
components. In this case the magical engine at the heart of the wand
has to draw its power from somewhere. Exotic power sources and even
real magic was considered, but given the rather patchy availability of
these we felt that the simplest solution was to draw all the power
needed from two AAA primary cell batteries.

Two other pictures show some of the reference we gathered to help the
design process.

Cheers

Chris

handle studies

Handle Studies from Pens

One of the first photographs of the first model of the wand. The shaft was
turned in box wood, the crisscross area cast in resin and sprayed and then
painted and distresses, and the handle was made in a number of parts from
ivoroid (a mock ivory made from a very hard plastic that is good as an
engineering material) the end cap / battery door was turned in metal (just
like the real wand) and gold plated.

early wooden wand