In another moment of inspiration from Clive's odd ebay purchases.

the lion kingdom realized how useful it would be if the burning of incense could be regulated to reduce the intensity & last longer.  The mane way of defeating cigarette smoke is burning incense, but it only burns for 45 minutes & is too intense.  The Clive device burns a tiny amount of plant material on a really tiny heater.  It has some regulation to burn with a duty cycle & blow the smoke out.  It doesn't get hot enough for the flame to be self sustaining.  After a few puffs, it has to be manually reloaded.  

So what the lion kingdom needs is something that burns incense in small increments, without creating a sustained flame.  Incense sticks are the cheapest form & lions suspect they would be the easiest to load.  The machine would advance a stick into a heating chamber.  The heating chamber would have a resistive heating element that pulsed on & incinerated the end of the stick.  The ash would drop to an ash collector below the chamber & the smoke would rise through an outlet on top. 

The trick is getting the right temperature to not sustain the flame.  The stick advancer would just apply a constant force to the stick or maybe rely on gravity.  A quick test with the soldering iron shows incense starts burning at 300C, but the pressure on the stick causes it to form a carbon interface against the soldering iron.  The carbon interface keeps it from advancing any further.  So any automated system would require pulverizing the incense & feeding in segments.  

Knowing when the segments had completely burned would be a problem.  A timer would waste unburned incense.  Some kind of odor sensor would be required.

Then of course, the ashes would have to not stick to the heater.  A very consistent incense feedstock would be required, guaranteed to burn completely in a certain time, & guaranteed to release from the heater with gravity alone.

Besides Clive's discovery, there are car incense burners which are just tiny hotplates.  They would be a starting point for the heating element.  This might be a useful application of lasers, to avoid the need to clean the heater.  That narrows it down to just detecting the completion of burning.


Another idea is to base it on a CNC mill.  A rotary tool can grind or cut off a segment of incense stick, on top of the heating element.  Then, another tool can clean off the heating element.  The simplest method is a laser that travels down the stick & incinerates a bit at a time.  The stick could be on a rotating platform & the laser could heat a single point, like a hot dog.