Wands

This is a placeholder for the wands.

My friend Micha was the Olivander of the potions party. He found some great balustrade that could be cut into two segments, giving us two different sizes of wand. Each wand has a neodymium magnet in the tip, so that the Hall Effects transistors in the other gadgets can sense their presence. I used two different sizes of magnet, appropriate to the two different size wands.

Micha painstakingly cut and stained each wand in a variety of custom one-of-a-kind patterns:

Each wand holds a magnet in the tip.

He even made some wonderful etched wands for Christine and I:

The wands (and potions textbooks) were next to the front door, laid out on wand racks for folks to collect as they arrived to the party.

Lessons Learned

• I probably should have done more research on the sensitivity of Hall effects transistors. The bag of transistors I picked up from Digi-Key were more-or-less okay for the large 3/8” neodymium magnets, but required fairly close contact for the 1/8” magnets. Given the big magnets were $5 each, I probably should have shifted to do more transistor research to find a more sensitive model.