Ecolab

We noticed the frequency of people throwing compostable and recyclable items in the trash on campus. People are careless about their recycling and there is no incentive for people to recycle properly. This leads to contamination of recycling and more trash in landfills. We created Ecolab as a way incentivize and teach correct recycling. Our project tracks each user and awards points when a product is put in the correct bin. When a user wants to throw something away, they hold it over the trash bin. Our camera senses it and the user puts the item in the bin. Afterwards, the bin flashes a blue light if they recycled it in the correct bin and a red light if they were incorrect. We used image recognition API from Microsoft as well as an Arduino. The biggest challenge we ran into was utilizing the API and connecting the server to the Arduino.