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HACKING THE GLADE WISP

Make your own scent output peripheral from a piezo air freshener. By Wayne Holder

Photography by Wayne Holder

Not long ago, my 11-year-old daughter Belle wanted Before you go tearing the Wisp apart, get familiar to create a gadget that would amuse her dog Panda with how the manufacturer intended it to work. by dispensing different scents for him to sniff. I had Screw in the scent bottle, remove the red blocking no idea how to control the dispensing of fragrances, tab from the battery, and watch the unit in opera-so we took a trip to the local pharmacy and checked tion for a few minutes. out the electric air fresheners. Set the Wisp to its strongest setting, use a desk Most of them diffused fragrances with heat or fans, lamp to illuminate it from the side, and hold a dark but one, the Glade Wisp, claimed to use a microchip piece of paper behind it; you should be able to see to “automatically puff” scented oils into the air. white vapor puff out from the top about every 10 to Intrigued, I bought one to see what made it tick. 15 seconds. This will show you what to expect from The Glade Wisp runs off a single AA battery, which your modified unit. If you’re curious about how the powers a vibrating piezoelectric disc that atomizes Wisp works, you can read the patent online; see the and disperses aromatic oil in short, smoke-like puffs. references for this article at makezine.com/16/ The Wisp turns out to be easy to hack — for less than diyhome_aroma.

$10 you can make a computer-controlled aromatic atomizer for all sorts of practical and artistic projects. 1. Hack in and hook up.

Here’s how I modified a Wisp to be controlled by an Now let’s see what’s inside. First, pry off the top Arduino board running just a few lines of code. shell, starting from the end opposite the adjustment

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