Celebrate Harry Potter’s 20th Anniversary With Some Magical Maker Projects

Today marks the official 20th anniversary of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter franchise. The first book, “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,” was published on June 26, 1997. To celebrate, we’ve compiled a list of our favorite Hogwarts-inspired projects from the Maker community.

Harry Potter body shocking wands with speech recognition…It’s indistinguishable from magic! With the release of “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” we took magic wands from Harry Potter to create a shocking new game.

Connected to websites and WiFi-enabled products, this smart wand is made to recognize voice spells and serve related functions, such as summoning (ordering) items, turning on and off the light, playing and silencing the music, etc.

It’s a broom with a gyroscope/accelerometer module, and an Arduino Leonardo emulating a joystick. Simple enough.

This Sorting Hat was made with with some recycled materials, as well as five servo motors connected to an Arduino Uno.

The Marauder’s Map Clock combines both the visuals of the map with the who is home technology of the Weasley Clock. The motors and LEDs are controlled by an Arduino Uno and the Wi-Fi detection is done by a Raspberry Pi Zero. The two are linked via a series of relays.

This Internet Connected Remembrall functions alongside Todoist, which is a web and mobile to-do list application. After gathering the owner’s data, the Remembrall turns red if due dates of uncompleted tasks have passed.

I made a digital version of the Weasley Clock for my parents — everyone in the family creates locational rules on their phones, and it updates whenever they enter a specified radius!

Taking inspiration from the Harry Potter character’s Weasley Clock, this one uses Particle and IFTTT to tell you where two people are.

After a recent trip to Universal’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter, my daughters and I decided to create a project that could use the interactive wands from the theme park, at home, to control our own props and gadgets. We called it Raspberry Potter because it was powered with a Raspberry Pi.

Just add a NeoPixel stick to a makeshift wand, connect a Micro:bit, write some code, … Lumos. Lumos maxima! Nox.

Lights show where my wife (red) and I (blue) are in New York. When we are together, the light changes to purple. Uses the OwnTracks iPhone app and a CloudMQTT server to update the Raspberry Pi with our location.