BinDayCator
By Andrew Gregory. Posted
This article was originally published as part of HackSpace magazine, which has since been incorporated into Raspberry Pi Official Magazine.
After a few too many forgotten bin collections, Darren Tarbard decided to make a mini bin day indicator using colourful tech.
"I designed, using Blender, and 3D-printed a bin that I could fit the electronics unobtrusively within for a clean design. The electronics consist of an ESP8266 programmed via Arduino and some NeoPixels. I made a YouTube tutorial to show people how to make their own:
"We have four different coloured recycling bins that are collected based upon a collection schedule created by the council" so "the second part of the puzzle was creating a Node-RED flow which polls my local council website each day. The BinDayCator then uses this to automatically show the correct bin colour(s) and pulse when the bin needs to be put out. The tutorial for this part is here:
"When I tweeted about my creation, I was amazed to find it struck a chord with lots of people, getting nearly six thousand retweets, two million views, and reshared on Reddit and Facebook where it got thousands of comments."
Features Editor Andrew trawls the internet for Cool Stuff while keeping the magazine running smoothly.
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