Recyclops

When a mere 9% of waste is being recycled in Canada, something is not right. Our product, the Recyclops, will take you to another level of recycling, so you can be the change in your community today

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This is for TOHacks 2021

Inspiration

86% of plastic waste ends up in landfills, while a mere 9% is actually recycled. When organic waste decomposes, Carbon dioxide and methane gas are released; they are both greenhouse gases, which contribute greatly to climate change and global warming. Most of the waste ends up in landfills due to the poor sorting and recycling of households. In order to help combat this, our team created the Recyclops.

What it does

Recyclops is auto-detection machine that can help households to properly recycle waste as well as using the millions of dollars that the government spends on proper recycling to reward the users instead.

How we built it

Recyclops combines a raspberry pi, google vision label detection, and a servo release mechanism to detect recyclable and non recyclable materials and update it to a firebase realtime database. Through its companion app programmed in flutter and dart, the user is able to view the items in their recycling bin and apply for rewards earned after responsible recycling habits.

Challenges we ran into

This project involved a lot of different skills and knowledge such as mechanical design, flutter development, and et cetera. So we had to learn while we were creating the project. One of the challenges that we ran into was reading the firebase. Initially we didn’t read the data from the firebase properly and it wasn’t giving the proper data that we wanted, but in the end we managed to solve the problem.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As first-year engineering students, we are proud of being able to communicate effectively especially when combining aspects of the mechanical, electrical, and programming in a time-critical project where we have to make sure each component can fit together in the end. This is also the first hackathon for one of our team members. Navigating a hackathon in the midst of a pandemic is certainly no easy feat, and thus we are proud that we got involved.

What we learned

Through this project, everyone on our team had developed great amounts of skills and knowledge. As a whole team, we learned about vision AI, flutter, firebase, courier, inventor, UI design, and many flutter libraries.

What's next for Recyclops

Currently, recyclops is initially prototype, so it has few improvements for the future, we will design the machine for different types of recycling bins. Also, the app will have more functionality such as telling the user the recycle day is been move due to holidays as well as improve the UI design of the app.

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