Self Disposing Trash Can

Inspiration

Our trash can was inspired by the average college apartment living experience. Oftentimes, it's difficult and awkward to communicate with roommates who never do their share of chores, specifically those that never take out the trash. Imagine a trash can that did that for you... you'd never have to awkwardly confront your roommate about taking out the trash ever again!

What it does

This self-disposing trash can is attached to a self-driving autonomous rover with obstacle detecting sensors that allow the trash can to drive itself to a designated disposal area, which is detected via an RGB sensor. It'll tip itself along a servo motor to dispose of its contents. This auto-drive function is triggered when the trash can is detected to be full using an ultrasonic sensor, and it'll then proceed through the self-driving, self-disposing procedures until all contents are gone.

How we built it

We built this rover using parts provided by the Bithacks committee as well as some electronic starter kits that we had on hand. Our microcontroller was the ESP32-C3 model and all our connections were made via breadboard and jumper wires. We used 2 servos, one for the obstacle detecting module and the other for the trash disposing module, 2 DC motors and wheels for the motor, and an OLED screen to display the percentage of "fullness" of the trashcan for the user. Our base was simply a piece of wood, our mounts were made of cardboard, and our prototype trashcan is represented by a plastic cup.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into were the hardware components given that were really faulty and broke often. We had to replace several servos that stooped functioning for no reason, which really set us back on time. It was also difficult that we had no 3D printing machine, so all our mechanisms and designs had to be cut out manually from materials such as packaging and cereal boxes.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team is proud of accomplishing such a daring project in such a short period of time. We all came into this hackathon blind, not knowing how such events worked and with no ideas for what we planned to make. However, we came out of it with valuable hands-on experience and pride over a project that has blossomed from an idea to an actual product in less than 36 hours.

What we learned

We learned many things about the engineering design process, since our rover had several peripheral features that allowed it to be more unique but functional as well. Obstacle detection, autonomous driving, fill level detection, color detection, and so forth were all concepts that we were not exposed to until creating this rover. We learned so much about embedded systems and how software and hardware components were able to work in tandem to meet the design constraints we wished to fulfill. It also allowed use to be more comfortable with a microcontroller different than the Arduino UNO, since this is usually the entry-level microcontroller we were exposed to for beginner projects.