Control Your Home with Magic

3 Videos

Series Summary

In this video series, I show you how to control your smart home with a magic wand from the Magiquest game at Great Wolf Lodge (or from eBay)!

I show you how to make an infrared receiver listening for signals cast specifically from these Magiquest wands, effectively repurposing the wands into home automation controllers.

You could allow your children to control their lighting and devices around the house with magic wands, OR you could even set up your OWN “Magic Quest” at home!

Thanks to the power of open source software, the IRRemote package available for ESP microcontrollers has built-in support for the infrared magic wands meant for Magiquest at the Great Wolf Lodge, so this isn’t very dev-heavy and only requires some light config-file wrangling.

I walk you through how everything works, building the sensor, flashing the configuration to the sensor, and then using the sensor in home assistant.

I also make multiple hardware recommendations, but none of the specific pieces I recommend are absolutely mandatory and you can make your own custom setup work just as well.

The sensor is an ESP based microcontroller (in my case an esp8266) flashed with ESPHome with an attached TSOP4838 IR receiver.

Components available in my store

3D printed case
Full kit
Fully assembled wand sensor

Products mentioned in this video series

Note: the following are Amazon affiliate links. If you use these links to purchase, I get a small commission. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, but it helps me out a lot. Thanks!

TSOP4838 IR Receiver
UL listed USB plug
ESP8266 D1 Mini Clone
Nice long USB cables
ESP32
(Note on this ESP32: The one I tested was USB-C and it had trouble with wifi range. The amazon comments claim that this wifi problem only exists for the USB-C version, so I’ve linked the micro USB version, but I have not personally tested the micro USB version. It should theoretically be the same except without the wifi problem…)

Resources

Github repository with ESPHome configuration files

Home assistant installation guide

This site gives you microcontroller pinouts

STL and OpenSCAD files for the 3D printed case

https://www.printables.com/model/916690-wemos-d1-mini-infrared-sensor-enclosure
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6666582

In addition to printables/thingiverse, the OpenSCAD file is available in the github repository. If you make any improvements or additional variations, send me a pull request on github!

Shout out to the original case designer:
https://www.thingiverse.com/brainfever/designs
I came up with my case by editing this design:
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1768820

Writeup

Work in progress! Come back soon for a full writeup of this project.