Smart Trash Bin

Inspiration

It all started out as a big joke and the desire to do a huge hardware hack. it later became an idea that became plausible with the potential to help our society in a positive manor. We that by encouraging everyone to become aware of their carbon footprint will help reduce the increasing negative impacts of the greater amount of garbage on the ecology.

What it does

It can send a text message telling you the amount of trash in a trash bin. This is accomplished by using ultrasound sensors on Arduino boards. The Arduinos relay to a Dragonboard which also triggers the SMS service from StdLib. The trashbin prototype is made of cardboard and held together by tape. The lid of the trash bin can be opened and closed by using two step motors which are attached to Arduinos as well. The goal of this project was the imitate the effects an exercising app has on an user. If the app recognizes that your waste consumption is reducing, a nice encouraging text message will be sent to you!

How we built it

We built our hack using 2 arduino UNO's and 1 Dragonboard 410c to run the stream to .txt parsing which is used to later decide what to do with the user data

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we into is the set up of the dragonboard since there were not a lot of reference materials online and we also did not have a monitor to start off with which made the first 8 hours of setting up the dragonboard insanely hard.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was our first time doing a hardware hack and we were able to make everything flow nicely together, despite some parts being left out at the end.

What we learned

We learned how to get one arduino to communicate with another and how to send data to a computer, in this case a dragonboard. We also learned how to use the SMS Service from StdLib.