Can you IoT an Airwick air freshener? (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Can you IoT an Airwick air freshener? (2020)

jcallaghan.com

44 points1_player31 comments

Now hook it up to a methane sensor that is also connected via WiFi and add a loudspeaker - so everytime the sensor sees heightened methane concentrations you spray and play an audio file that says "uh-oh, fart" in a Rainman voice.

(Hey downvote me all you want, we're talking about strapping a dual core MCU to an air freshener. It isn't like this was Nobel Prize material to begin with :-))

Not a fan of spreading perfume, but Airwicks are a great source of an aesthetically acceptable case with battery compartment and motion sensor. I have one in each room of the house modified for sensing which is then used to drive a central thermostat.

Great write up! While this one probably isn't for me, it's planted the seed of an idea. I have a new kitten who we've just started allowing free roam of the house at night, which is fine until dawn when she thinks we all need to be awake and starts running around like a mad thing at half past stupid in the morning.

If I can make one of her noisier toys smart, maybe I can get Alexa to call her downstairs by turning it on, thereby giving us some peace without locking her away all night.

Hah, I did the same thing in much the same way, though IIRC I didn't use a relay, I used the existing circuit board and found the place where their MCU output the signal to move the motor. Pretty nice hack, at least until I realized I didn't want a thing spraying perfume in my house.

A long-neglected project on my to-do list is to do exactly the opposite with one of these. I want to use the circuit board to detect movement in front of it and use the motor output to close a relay instead of squirting smelly stuff. The relay would then trigger a button push on my wireless doorbell button and ring the doorbell if it detected movement.

I really should get back on that.

This would be much simpler with just an ESP instead of messing around with the air freshner mechanism, it'll be more trouble than its worth.

Well now I have to do it, don't I? :P

Same here, I found this article because I was looking for a time mod so it would spray less often than it does out-of-the-box. And now I'm convinced I should not be spraying any questionable chemical perfume in my house anyway.

Me too. I used the existing board and connected myself directly to the transistor.

Used http://toit.io to connect the ESP32 to the cloud so I could control it from my phone (with a tiny Flutter app).

Next evolution of this is some fecal to air counter, with a voice stating "Alexa, IT IS STINKY"

That can be done I think. There are some VOC and particulate sensors that can be had for cheap, and they might respond to human recognizable stink.

It would be easier to put a water flow sensor on the toilet though.

Oh for sure, that makes more sense. It just makes me chuckle that in the future using public restrooms, that people will try not to trigger a response from the 'air freshener AI'.

Using "IoT" as a verb is an interesting and horrible development.

They're reading the silent S in IoT as the verb "secure".

Love the concept but hate the smell of these "air fresheners" that just spray horrible perfume. Thank God for products such as carbonfilters and Yocoair that remove odour instead.

Hmm I have one that kills mosquito's - instead of squirting every x minutes it should listen to the sound in the room filtering out my snoring and wife talking to herself , the cats moving about and figure out how many actual mosquito's there are.

Perhaps they can combine this project with this [1] project.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27124671

Thanks for the write up because it is really details and helps someone to understand and learn. Good job.

Should you IoT an Airwick air Freshener? [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26732229

I never understood the point of these, and their names are misleading: the do NOT refresh your air, they spread scent! If you think you need that, you probably should be cleaning or identify and eliminate a particular source of bad odours, not spraying masking scents into the air like a 17th century courtier in Paris.

> they spread scent! If you think you need that, you probably should be cleaning or identify and eliminate a particular source of bad odours

What if you think you need that because you prefer pleasant scents to the neutral absence of noticeable scent, not because of “a particular source of bad odours”?

Then why are they called air fresheners and not scent-generators or something like that?

> Then why are they called air fresheners

Because “fresh" has long been considered a descriptor of particular noticeable scents, not the absence of scent (also true, though not as relevant here, of particular tastes.)

I imagine the "healthy" connotation that the term fresh carries is good for marketing. "generator" sounds industrial, polluting.. makes one wonder if it causes adverse health effects.

You're right, and that's why I consider their name misleading: these things are thoroughly unhealthy, and may mask another source of unhealth (bad scent maybe due to hidden mold for instance).

Not all odour sources are easily controllable (cooking in open plan apartments, pets, flat mates, toilets, etc.). Increasing ventilation also is not always practical, like when it's -5c outside, or you live on a main road where the air aggravates your allergies.

Also many people just like the scents and aren't trying to cover up anything.

Airfilters (with carbonfilters) are quite effective.

You can make a bet that those "scent" are much more toxic as you think. An filtration with an active-coal-filter solves your problem much better.

"14,000 estimated to have died from humidifier sanitizer scandal: study"

https://koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2020/07/251_293448.html

The manufacturer was Reckitt Benckiser, who is also the manufacturer of Airwick.

https://www.reckitt.com/brands/air-wick/

When HN thinks distilled and highly concentrated scents are a good thing ;)

BTW: There is ~some proof that geranium is a big allergic-igniter

The idea seems trivial. The original Airwick works with batteries so you just hook some SoC to it and you're done. Another pointless pretty toy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com