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Almost horizontal chalkboard with a wooden frame floating in a dark blue light

Welcome Motherboard X!

We’re officially launching the new model of the Motherboard on 12. October, 2026! We’ve poured our hearts and souls into this project and are beyond excited to finally share it with you! To celebrate the upcoming release, we’re also launching our blog, where we’ll be sharing the stories, ideas, and visions behind our creations.

Here’s to kicking off the first article by taking you behind-the-scenes of Motherboard X.


A Little Yves Doumergue, A Big Vision For The Future

The idea of the Motherboard actually goes back to 12-year-old Yves flipping through the pages of a science magazine. One article caught his eye: a piece about the future of paper and “e-pages.” Yves remembers the article talking about traditional newspapers eventually being replaced by something like soft journals that would digitally display content.

“I thought the technology was almost there and we would only be a few months away from reading our news on tablet-like devices,” Yves says. “I immediately thought of ideas for magic effects, like making predictions using the classified section of a newspaper.”

But the tech wasn’t actually there yet and 40 years passed by.

Yves never forgot about his fascination with futuristic paper. While “e-paper” never quite became what he had imagined, technology continued to evolve over the years and tablets arrived. After becoming a magician, he intuitively connected his childhood fascination with one of mentalism’s most iconic props: the chalkboard.


A Breakthrough In Mentalism

It took about 2 years of development, prototyping, and testing for the very first version of the Motherboard, which Yves started using at his shows in 2020. This initial prototype was just a simple model. By using it for his performances, Yves started developing more and more ideas for its use. Over the next few years, he progressively added more functions and hardware improvements.

The Motherboard soon became a one-of-a-kind tool that enabled mentalists to perform incredible predictions, mind reading effects, and more.

The most convincing illusion: Real time chalk writing that doesn’t only look like writing with chalk but also sounds like it. We’re convinced that to this day, no other replica of the Motherboard has come as close to the realistic look and sound of a real chalkboard.

“When I started showing it to magicians, they were all in disbelief. I simply wrote something on the board and erased it. Everyone thought I was writing on a real chalkboard. But it was all fake!” – Yves

The perfect illusion of a chalkboard was born and enabled never-seen-before effects and routines. 


Designed For The Stage, Refined For The Performer 

The Motherboard is often characterized by:

Here, we’d like to take a moment to highlight the reliability factor: For a performing magician, a reliable device and failsafes are crucial. We pride ourselves on having created an extremely stable system for the Motherboard in the first place but just as importantly, it includes built-in fallback options, such as the Digital Thumbwriter and other backup systems, so that even if something unexpected happens, your performance doesn't end in disaster.

“Even if you don’t need it, just knowing it’s there will make you feel so much more at ease,” Yves says. “ And if you end up needing it, it will literally save you!”


Motherboard Legacy

Yves had made a deliberate choice to keep the secrecy of the Motherboard over the last 6 years by avoiding any kind of open communication about it : No ads, no videos, no trailers, no promotions. Nothing. 

“Magicians were talking about the Motherboard but nobody knew where to get it,” Yves says. “You either needed to know someone or go on a scavenger-hunt like journey to come to us. This alone made the Motherboard so much more special.”

But things are different today: Magicians are widely aware of the Motherboard and its success inspired other companies to copy it.

“If you go online and look for something like “magic chalkboard” today, you will get a bunch of search results from companies that have developed similar products,” Yves says. “And that’s a shame! For them, it’s all about profit. But that also means it takes the magic away.”

That’s the main reason we decided to keep as much information as possible hidden, rather than fully exposed to everyone. If a spectator searches online for the "chalkboard trick" they just witnessed, we'd rather they don't immediately find the exact board they saw on stage. 

If you want to find more information about it, you will have to dig a little bit 😜

“We really want to protect the secrets and heritage of the Motherboard, so it doesn’t end up in the same category as trapdoors, sleeves, and mirrors.” – Auren


Improved To Its Limits

Working on the Motherboard never stopped. Over the years, we added more features and gradually revised and improved the quality of elements like the chalk and frame.

The last major breakthrough feature to the Motherboard, Whisper Remote, was released in 2023. “The best human interface to secretly communicate with any device,” Yves says.

Our ideas and vision for the Motherboard kept evolving and we saw more and more potential for the Motherboard to accomplish groundbreaking illusions: new routines that could send information from the Motherboard to other apps and services, deeper integrations with third-party tools, and even other services being able to integrate directly into the Motherboard itself.

There was just one problem: the Motherboard's inside technology wasn't built for what we now wanted it to do. Both the core hardware and software, designed in the early 2020s, had reached their limits when it came to evolving further and adapting to new services or AI. 

"New technology needs a foundation that was built to handle it. Before anything new could go into the Motherboard, the basics had to be rebuilt from the ground up to actually support it,” explains Rudy, developer and Conjuring Lab’s “tech brain.”

Like a sign from the universe, Rudy, joined the team right around the time we resigned ourselves to the Motherboard's limits. Astonishingly, he was able to think of solutions to evolve the technology on both the hardware and software side almost immediately.


A Big Decision in 2025

With the conceptualization of what changes we would work on and a plan to entirely focus on developing the new model, we made the difficult decision to pause production and sales of the Motherboard in 2025. We didn't want to keep selling a soon-to-be-outdated version when the new model was on the horizon.

But an endeavour this big comes with real uncertainty. 

As with any invention built from the ground up, it had been difficult to make accurate projections about completion. A project like the Motherboard carries multi-layered complexity and dependence on external suppliers, services and apps. Some of them depended on their own set of external factors as well. 

“Development takes time, especially when you're aiming for something as close to perfect as possible,” Auren explains.

Unfortunately, not every email inquiring about the Motherboard during this time was met with the patience it deserved. Which is why, at this point, we genuinely want to thank everyone who’s shown support and patience along the way!


Behind The Rebuild

The scope of the rebuild was massive! From hardware support challenges and the WiFi chip, all the way to a full software rewrite. The first step was analyzing how everything at present worked internally. From there, we rethought the user interface and experience: keeping the familiar concepts and intuitive elements users already knew, but reshaping them into something more cohesive and streamlined, while integrating entirely new functions on top.

“Rebuilding everything from the ground up was a really challenging undertaking but looking back at it with the Motherboard X in our hands, we can see it was worth it.” – Rudy

We also addressed community feedback and fixed reported shortcomings, for example:

Today, Motherboard X is more integrated and more open to other systems than ever, all thanks to the modifications we really took the time to work on.


The Journey Continues

We are beyond proud about the release of Motherboard X, a project that truly pushed us to create something incredible. This updated model opens so many new doors and moving forward, we’re excited to experiment with:


We’re looking forward to seeing where things go and we love to hear your ideas as we design what comes next. 

Again, thank you for your support along the way!

Your Conjuring Lab Team

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