Controlling a Smart Home with a Wand Just Like Harry Potter Would

When Harry Potter wants to dim the lights or play NPR shows, he certainly doesn’t bother asking his Amazon Echo to do it for him. He’s a wizard, and so he just waves his magic wand and mumbles a bit of Latin to get it done. That’s something we can all be a little jealous of. But Adam Thole didn’t just accept life as a muggle, and instead used technology to create his own magically-controlled smart home.

Thole built this project for his son’s Harry Potter-themed birthday party, and it was obviously inspired by the magic wands you can purchase and cast “spells” with at Universal Studios’ The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. At the theme park, there are various places where visitors can wave their magic wands to produce some kind of effect. Thole’s project does the same thing, but actually accomplishes practical goals — and a few that are just fun for his son’s birthday party.

Right now, his setup can respond to a wand to turn lights on, change the room color lighting, play a song, turn on a fountain, or start up a popcorn machine. The wands themselves are inexpensive, 3D-printed, and contain no electronic components of their own. All they have is a highly reflective tip. At two stations in his home, Thole set up a Raspberry Pi Zero W with a Raspberry Pi NoIR Camera. IR LEDs shine into the room and reflect off of the tip of the wands, creating a bright point that is easily picked up by the camera.

In short time lapses, the camera watches the movement of that bright point. The resulting shape is then analyzed to see if it matches a “spell” in the library. If it does, then open source software called Home Assistant is used to control the corresponding device in his home. This project proves that sufficiently-advanced technology really is indistinguishable from magic.