That is also a chance for all other people who were not able to attend QCon London this month to enter one of the popular exhibition drawings.

The Kymera Wand is a truly magical device. It allows you to control many of the apparatuses at home using invisible beams of light. It recognizes up to 13 gestures of control to cast spells of all kinds to differnt devices.

(read: It’s a universal gesture based infrared control in the form of a magic wand.)

Just tweet why you’d like to have one and add the #kymera tag, you can also include a link to this post: http://bit.ly/9f5WQg.

One special note: You will enter the drawing as often as your twitter follower count is on the log10 scale.

Examples:

• 1..9 followers = does not qualify
• 10..99 followers = enter once
• 100..999 followers = enter twice
• 1000…9999 followers = enter 3 times
• etc.

Depending on the amount of tweets, I’ll add them to this post’s comments, with the tweet text and your follower count, then I’ll draw from this list.

The winner will be notified by mail or DM and posted here.

Good Luck

Michael

Made of soft brown and black leather with individual engravings and ornaments these are worthy keepers of your Kymera Wand.

These exclusive uniquely crafted sheats are available for 44 EUR each including free worldwide shipping. So be the first and grab yours.

If you’re intersted just drop me an email: info at kymera-wand.com.

If you were unlucky enough to get none, you can still protect your precious Kymera Wand in one of our beautiful wand pockets.

Envelope with pouch

thewandcompany in french

I never knew that “wand” in french is “baguette (magique)” the same as the famous bread, it certailny means “staff”.

Here is a short quote from the fabulous letter of Lord Byron:

Cher lecteur

Qui d’entre nous n’a jamais rêvé au moins une fois au fond de son cœur de posséder une baguette magique bien à lui et d’utiliser son pouvoir? Je ne parle pas des charlataneries et autres tours de passe-passe de pseudo magiciens de cabarets; non, je parle bien de vraie et grande magie permettant d’agir à distance. J’ai parcouru le monde à la recherche de puissants ingrédients et d’obscurs mécanismes qui, savamment combinés, pourraient doter le plus novice apprenti du pouvoir de contrôler tout objet dan sa maison.

…

Si vous devenez l’un des privilégiés à posséder un exemplaire des quelques baguettes Kymera venant à être conçues, vous me rejoindrez au sein des pionniers du nouvel âge de la magie et ensemble, nous nous exercerons mutuellement, dans la joie, à ne plus sombrer dans le morne et préhistorique réflexe de presser les touches d’une télécommande.

Votre humble serviteur et aventurier pour la vie,

Sir Richard Barons

The beautiful manual was translated some time ago and is also available from there.

french manual

Don’t forget to check out the other languages. We translated the German version and our friend Peter Neubauer the Swedish one.

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.

Wand in the Pocket

The Wand Makers were kind enough to offer us the chance to present the wand pouches to you first.

Pouches for the Kymera Wand

So here they are – available first in an amazing fine red Chinese silken fabric, embroidered with golden dragons. Your wand slides into the pouch easily and is hidden and protected by some powerful charms the Wandmakers put into the golden threads.

This pocket is not only for the lucky Kymera wand owner but for everyone who has a magic wand of his own. It is also the perfect gift for every aspiring or experienced wizard you happen to know.

The pockets are available for just EUR 9,95. When you order them with your wand they’re included in the free shipping offer, otherwise we ask for a flat 2 EUR worldwide shipping fee.

So don’t hesitate and “Pocket Your Wand”

Order Pocket for your Wand

Order Wand with Pocket

Envelope with pouch

Please bear in mind:
That wand’s batteries should be isolated, i.e. turned round or taken out before
transporting the wand. As because it is a motion sensitive piece of
equipment, transport activates it, uses up the batteries and can put the
wand in to various modes including a sequence which completes a factory
reset.

Envelope for pouch

All the information you need

I’m guessing that not too many people are yet aware of the newest generation of life-like flickering LED candles that can be controlled by an IR remote. For the utmost in Harry Potter-esque control, this is the bees knees, as they say.

This is just two such examples, but if you google on “remote led candle” you’ll get a ton of hits from various manufacturers and distributors:

http://www.batteryoperatedcandles.net/G … ducts.html
http://www.batteryoperatedcandles.net/r … ducts.html

I still get an almost perverse blast out of controlling my triple candle set this way. It really looks like magic, folks. Anyone remember Dumbledore’s year opening speech in the Great Hall in “Prisoner of Azkaban”, where he waves his hand over the candles, and they extinguish, and waves his hand back, and they relight? Okay, so he didn’t use his wand there, but you get the idea. Thus I’ve set my wand’s right flick to turn the candles off, and the left flick to turn them on.

- -
Incidentally, There’s also a new generation of LED candles that can be operated simply by blowing on them, (actually, I can get mine to go on or off by simply snapping my fingers a few inches above it, which is also magical looking) but that’s another story.

_________________
Accio Kymera!

The Kymera Wand from Marc LaFountain on Vimeo.

Everyone else – thanks for participating. I hope you had fun devising your incantations and will take part in future drawings.

Accio Kymera!

Michael

In the meantime he published a review of his own:

The pictures on the internet might show how the wand looks, but nothing can tell you how it truly is to hold and look at, before you hold it yourself! Honestly, I actually thought the plastic would be a bit… cheap. But it isn’t! It isn’t wood, but I think it’s nearly as good.

I quickly learned it a signal, and I made a big smile the first time when I turned our TV on. It didn’t just control the TV, it also gave me a feeling of… real magic, as if I was holding a real wand in my hand.

He also translated the danish blog post by David Guldager:

A review by TV2 beep:

This is how a real wand works

It’s not just bearded men with tall pointy hats, who are allowed to swing with wands. You have the opportunity youself, and we’ve tried the most strange gadget we’ve ever seen.

There are products you really can’t see the idea beind, and then gadgets that are so strange and different, that you would never imagine they would be for sale.

For two weeks ago, we wrote about a very real wand, called Kymera, and to be honest, I though it was a joke, but when a Danish contact person wrote to us, to hear if we wanted to test the wand, we wouldn’t say no.

Many have been running around as little with a stick, trying to make bushes to enemies or make mess in a room disappear. But yet, those “magic wands” haven’t quite worked for me.

Considerable skepticism

Therefore, my skepticism was indeed more than apparent, when I received the wand in a black oblong box. But when I saw the wand Kymera down in the box presented in red, I had to give me a bit.

Suddenly I was aware of the magic moments.

I don’t know what I had expected, but wands today still can’t make the mess disappear, make my wife into a bush or do anything else, than act as a good old-fashioned remote control. But it also does that fine.

Magic on your tv

Kymera itself is made by a company, who of course have the firm name, The Wand Company Ltd. Their somewhat different remote control can control a TV from movement, and it’s more techable than one might think.

By turning the wand vertically and tap two times on the middle, you get the opportunity to learn your wand some tricks from your remote. It’s shakes gently when it has understood, and when you’re then sitting in front of your TV, flicking your wand to shift channel, it shakes gently to confirm as well.
It works surpringly well, even though it can be a bit hard to learn the difference between the many movements your hand can perform. But if you just learn your wand tricks with widely different gestures, then you’re one step further.

Of course, this wand is also meant more as a smile, than a replacement of your remote control. It can only learn up to 13 different tricks, and the gestures can be somewhat cumbersome in length unlike what you’re used to – by pushing the button. And as one colleague pointed out, it’s much more fun to have on your table, than an ordinary remote control.

Kymera Specifications:

• Uses 2 AAA-batteries, can learn 13 “tricks”
• Costs about 100 dollars
• Is out from October 1st (2009)

We LOVE: Always interesting with magic wands, pretty techable, looks more fun than a remote control.

We HATE: Can’t make things disappear, actually it can’t do magic! Only 13 gestures, it’s difficult to distinguish between the different movements.

Written by David Guldager (Original danish review here
Translated from danish to english by Jan Nikolajsen

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


Hier ein paar Zitate:

Die Fantastische Universalfernbedienung

Manche Dinge muss ich einfach haben. Und der Zauberstab von Kymera gehört definitiv in diese Kategorie!

Tipps und Tricks

Leider kommt der Zauberstab derzeit nur mit einer (wunderschönen) englischen Bedienungsanleitung. Auf der Website des Herstellers gibt es auch einige Hinweise in deutsch. Da nicht alles ganz praxisnah beschrieben ist, hier noch eine weitere Anleitung für Deine Zauberstab-Fernbedienung aus meinen persönlichen Erfahrung.

Videos und Bilder

Der Zauberstab kommt in einer edlen Verpackung – außen Schwarz mit “Schlangenhaut” – innen mit edlem, roten Stoff ausgeschlagen und mit Goldverzierungen. Die Anleitung ist ebenfalls sehr aufwändig gestaltet und großformatig zum auseinanderfalten.

Es gibt Verweise auf Händler und auf zukünftiges Zubehör.

Sehr schön gemachte Seite, mit viel Liebe zum Details und wichtigen Informationen.
Ich hoffe, Arno behält die Begeisterung und findet die Zeit, die Seite weiter auszubauen.

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

We’ll start a new giveaway promotion in January, this time on twitter.

Please either retweet my initial tweet or do a tweet of your own.

The condition this time is to include the tag #kymera and a reference to this site http://kymera-wand.com that is not shortened. To be eligible you also MUST include a sensible incantation that can be used to perform magic with the Kymera Wand. For instance "Quietus" for muting.

Forum User Grymmditch did a great job listing some unique incantations in this post that we thankfully published in this blog entry.

Wishing you all much luck in this drawing. It ends January 31st.

Please Retweet.

Happy Casting

Michael

thanks for all the great comments and your participation. Especially Alex, Paul Higginbotham and Yetórico for their really impressive comments. I’ll do a roundup post these days of all the ideas you’ve written down.

Unfortunately there can be only one winner.

The winner of our December Giveaway promotion was selected with a swift flick of the Kymera Wand and it selected:

Congratulations to you. Please send us your postal address and your wand will leave ASAP. Hopefully you’ll have much fun with it. Please report back on your experience.

Michael

I’ve just decided as a new years gift, that whoever commented on the post and orders a wand within January with the email address used for the comment gets a 10% discount on the retail price of the Kymera Wand. Please note that you’re eligible for the discount in your order form.

If you didn’t win, just enter our new January drawing which is about twittering adequate incantations.

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

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

Harry Potteresque commands – latin

Has anyone else worked on some basic IR Remote/consumer electronics device command based latin spell incantations, so you can totally geek out ala Harry Potter while using your wand?
I’ve worked out about 15 so far, some were easy, some were not. This was actually kind of fun. I’m not a Latin major by any stretch, and some of the command concepts (like “ON” or “OFF”) don’t easily translate to a culture that ceased to exist roughly 1600 years ago, long before the advent of electronics.

Here’s my list so far though, feel free to add or recommend others!
(A good many of these should be fairly obvious as to their modern meaning or correlation, and some, like Vol Up/Down were lifted directly from Harry Potter)

On – Vivo or Possum (pronounced “Poss’-oom”)
Off – Dormito or Quiesco
Volume Up – Sonorus
Volume Down – Quietus
Channel Up – Ascendo or Supero
Channel Down – Descendo or Cado
Mute – Mutus or Sileo
Menu – Tabula or Codex
Play – Specto
Pause – Suspendo
Stop – Cesso or Finis
Record – Scribo
Rewind – Reciproco or Verto
Fast Forward – Rapio
Slow Search – Serpo

(special thanks to the latinlexicon.org site for most of these)

and the second post:

Laser tag, Kymera style

Here’s a thought – IR based tag systems, where kids armed with Kymera wands can duke it out wizard style.

They’d wear a special receiver plate on their chest and back, just as in laser tag, and the various gestures would register as sundry hexes/jinxes/curses- Avada Kedavra, Stupefy, Expelliarmus, Rictusempra, Tarantallegra, Petrificus, Sectum-Sempra, etc..

Have you guys talked at all with Warner Bros? I’m sure they’d go for this, (and other ideas) as official Harry Potter licensed merchandise. Otherwise, you’d probably have to rename the curses to something more generic.

_________________
Accio Kymera!

Grymmditch

Thanks alot for those great posts

Michael

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

As we want to learn what you‘re thinking about the Kymera Wand,
all you have to do is to make a sensible comment on this post with one of the following topics:

• creative application of the Kymera Wand (e.g. control iRobot Roomba)
• missing or completely new features for a wish list for the Kymera Wand
• interesting accessories
• improvements to this site
• suggestions for coverage, pictures, videos

Please make sure that you don’t repeat things people have already posted, those duplications will not be considered.

The drawing will take place on the last day of the year, December 31st.

Good luck to all of you.

Magical Christmas and a Fantastic New Year to all of YOU

Michael

P.S. Please retweet.

A Kymera Wand Box Contents

About Thrillist:

Thrillist: The Daily Candy For Men

If you’re still stumped about what to get your husband, brother or boyfriend this holiday…listen up. There’s a virutal place that helps to uncover the coolest gifts and gadgets for guys. And no matter their profession or pasttime… you’re bound to find something different and unique.

About the Kymera Wand:

Your significant other can get his Harry Potter magic on with the flick of a universal remote wand.


“It kind of works like an Nintendo Wii. You wave it around and program it to different motions that work to function different appliances,” says Joseph.

Fast Forward to 01:10.