Inspiration
Recycling is essential for a sustainable future, but its difficult! How often do you hover between the trash can and recycling bin, wondering where the item in your hand should go? In the past few months, UCSC has discontinued recycling due to trash contamination. We need a solution for quickly and easily deciding the fate of trash.
What it does
When a user walks up to the trash can, they are met with a button to press. After pressing, the user says the name of the item they wish to dispose. The trashcan responds by opening the correct receptacle, and closing the wrong one. When the trash can is full, the person responsible for emptying it is sent a text message notification through Notivize.
How we built it
We used a button connected to Arduino to trigger a Python app to record audio. The audio is sent to Google Cloud speech recognition servers where it is converted into text, and sent back to the flask server. The word or phrase is then compared to a dictionary of recycle vs. trash that we are hosting on Azure. When a decision is made, the python app sends a serial signal to the Arduino, which turns a servo motor, opening the correct receptacle and closing the wrong one. When the trash can is full, the person responsible for emptying it is sent a text message notification through Notivize.
Challenges we ran into
We encountered a oscillation in our servo due to positive feedback loop from overcorrection. To get around this, we turned the servo off after every time we changed its position.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that debugged the issues we encountered, and that the project is completely functional.
What we learned
We learned how to debug servo hardware issues, and how to connect hardware to running python servers, and how to integrate Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and AWS.
What's next for Eco Droid
Camera + image recognition to automatically identify trash. Robotics to physically self sort, so that the user only has to place the item in bin, without no extra action required.
Check out Eco Droid's marketing site at online here
Built With
- a-trashcan
- amazon-web-services
- arduino
- azure
- c
- cloud9
- google-cloud
- python
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