We took a trip down to “The Great Wolf Lodge” Centralia Washington recently and discovered the world of MagiQuest.
Here is a video that gives you the general idea.
Effectively its a hotel littered with IOT animatronics that kids can interact with by waving their IR wand around.
Great Wolf Lodge MagiQuest: How It Works + See How To Complete Dragon Adventure At Traverse City MI - YouTube
My daughter loved it but when we got home she effectively had a wand that had no other use.
I did a quick google to see if there was any way to integrate with home assistant, and sure enough, there is already a magiquest decoder built into the ESPhome “Remote Receiver” component.
For anyone else interested, it turned out to be pretty easy to setup.
The circuit is just a TSOP38236 (36hz) sensor connected to a digital input pin on a Wemos d1 mini clone (ESP8266).
Wiring:
TSOP38236 1/OUT → Wemos D4
TSOP38236 2/GND → Wemos Ground
TSOP38236 3/Vs → Wemos 5V
ESPHome Yaml:
At first I wasn’t having any luck getting the TSOP38236 to decode the wand, but after I tried setting inverted=true, it started working.
# IR Reciever
remote_receiver:
pin:
number: GPIO2
inverted: true
dump: magiquest
binary_sensor:
- platform: remote_receiver
name: "Magic Wand"
id: the_wand
magiquest:
wand_id: 0x091B3160
filters:
- delayed_off: 1000ms
To determine the wand ID, just add the “Dump: magiquest” setting and then watch the output in ESPHome to see the wand ID.
Then you can create the binary sensor that is specific to that wand ID.
