The Magic Wand

It started the way most of our projects start: with a very serious request. A wand. Not a stick-with-a-star wand. A wand that does magic.

I could have bought one. Instead I opened a parts drawer.

The brief

Every project here starts with the client — who is four — describing what he wants. For the wand, the requirements were roughly:

• It lights up
• Different spells do different things
• It must look like his wand, not a store wand

The art half

He designed the look: shape, colours, where the star goes. My job was to turn his drawing into something that could hold a circuit board without losing the magic.

The tech half

The wand needs to know which spell you cast. That means detecting motion — a flick, a swirl, a big swish — and mapping each gesture to a light effect.

1. Read motion data from the sensor many times per second.
2. Recognise the gesture (this is where the overengineering lives).
3. Trigger the matching light show.

Testing (the best part)

What the simple version would have been

A glow stick taped to a chopstick. He would have loved it. We both would have learned less.