The Smartest Air Freshener In The Room

December 16, 2017 by James Hobson 6 Comments

Many automatic air fresheners are wasteful in that they either ceaselessly spritz the room, and manual ones need to be — well — manually operated. This will not do in an era of smart products, so Instructables user [IgorF2] has put together an air freshener that does more than check if you’re around before freshening things up.

The air freshener uses a NodeMCU LoLin and an MG 995 servomotor, with a NeoPixel ring acting as a status light. Be aware — when the servo is triggered there is a significant spike in current, so be sure you aren’t powering the air freshener from a PC USB port or another device. After modeling the air freshener’s case in Fusion 360 — files available here — [IgorF2] wired the components together and mounted them inside the 3D printed case.

Hardware work completed, [IgorF2] has detailed how to set up the Arduino IDE and ESP8266 support for a first-time-user, as well as adding a few libraries to his sketch. A combination of an Adafruit.IO feed and ITTT — once again, showing the setup steps — handles how the air freshener operates: location detection, time specific spritzing, and after tapping a software button on your phone for those particularly lazy moments.

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R2-D2 Keeps This University Bathroom Smelling Fresh

March 20, 2016 by James Hobson 8 Comments

For a fun university project, [Cengizhan Can] and friends decided to make an automated air freshener for one of their bathrooms at the Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Happening to have an old R2-D2 plastic candy jar, they decided to try to see if they could make it Star Wars themed.

They loaded up the R2-D2 shell with an Arduino, a ton of sensors (don’t worry, nothing for spying) and an actuator for triggering the air freshener. During normal operation the LCD will display ambient temperature information and the approximate number of air freshener shots remaining in the canister. An external door sensor checks to see if the stall is open, and coupled with a light sensor, only sprays freshener after use, and when no one is in the stall anymore.
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Another Automatic Air Freshener Use

October 5, 2012 by Jeremy Cook 3 Comments

We’ve seen air fresheners used for many hacks here at hackaday. This one is a bit different as it uses the PIR sensor assembly to turn on LEDs in sequence, rather than reversing a motor. Generally, the motor would be reversed by the fact that this assembly is reversing the voltage on a motor (see [H Bridge] on Wikipedia), but instead it turns on one set of LEDs and then the other.

This works because a diode (the “D” in LED) only allows current to flow one way. The LEDs are reversed with respect to the voltage source, making them come on in sequence. An Arduino or other microprocessor could of course be used to accomplish the same thing (see this [HAD] post about harvesting the PIR sensor only). However, if you had $10 or less to start your hardware hacking career, this is yet another way an air freshener can be hacked up to do your bidding.

Be sure to see the video of this simple hack after the break, used to “LED-ify” a Star Wars AT-ST painting. If you’re interested in using the gears and motor of an air fresher as well, why not check out this post on remotely triggering a camera with the internals from a time-based model? Continue reading “Another Automatic Air Freshener Use” →

Fertilizing A Planted Aquarium Using Air Freshener Hardware

January 21, 2011 by Mike Szczys 34 Comments

Keeping live plants in an aquarium happy can be quite a chore. One of the frequent rituals is adding fertilizer, which is called dosing. [Majstor76] came up with a creative way to automatically dose using an air freshener. He got rid of the canister that holds the scent and re-purposed a hand soap pump to move the nutrient-rich liquid. After the break you can see that there’s no shortage of power to actuate the pump and the powered air freshener base has a delay circuit, allowing for a few different time-release options. As long as the volumetric output is fairly consistent we figure you can dilute your fertilizer to fine-tune the dose.

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Motion Activated Wildlife Camera (or A Spy Device)

November 21, 2010 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

Now you can capture pictures of our furry friends by building a motion activated wildlife camera. [Doug Paradis] took his Air Freshener hack and used it to trigger a camera. The white dome in the picture above is the PIR sensor from an Air Wick Freshmatic, along with a cheap keychain camera and an MSP430 microcontroller. He used one of the chips that came with the TI Launchpad, a transistor, and some discreet components to interface the devices and then put them into a project box. Now he’s got a fully configurable motion-sensing camera.

Gutting An Air Freshener For The Parts

September 24, 2010 by Mike Szczys 40 Comments

[Doug Paradis] took a good look inside the Air Wick Freshmatic Compact i-Motion and then stole all the parts for other projects. We’ve looked at adding a manual spray button or making air fresheners Internet enabled before. Those models didn’t have parts that were all that interesting, but this one has a passive infrared motion sensor. You’ll also gain three switches, a PNP transistor, and an LED.

Price seems to be all over the map for this model, but [Doug] says you can find it for $8 or less. After showing how to make a tool to bypass the triangular security screws, he explains how to access the PIR sensor. But if you want to be all you can be with the hardware, he details the modifications needed to patch into the analog and digital circuitry on the rest of the board too.

Stop Wasting Your Air Freshener

December 2, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 48 Comments

Airwick air fresheners come with an amazing feature. They spray air freshener every once in a while no matter what. It is extremely wasteful and obviously a marketing plan to force you to buy more. There is a solution though. You can hack them, to turn them back in to a manual release like they used to be. Two cuts and two soldered wires is all that is necessary.

yes, we know you could just buy an aerosol, but many of us just come home and find them in our bathrooms since someone else in the house bought it. If you’ve already got it, why not hack it? This is also a great project for teaching beginners how to improve hardware.

[thanks Asmor]