Inspiration
Recycling, or lack thereof, is a major issue in most countries and it is no less so in Singapore. While we are all educated from a young age about the importance of recycling, how many of us can say that we truly sort our trash at every instance? The Bin5.0 environment is our initiative aimed to tackle this issue.
What it does
With our Smart Bin Cap, we can transform any bin into a Smart Bin that is capable of sorting recyclable trash into three distinct groups - plastic, glass, and metal. It does it automatically for the user, so all they have to do is place their trash into the bin and it will sort it automatically for them, removing the potential for human error and negligence.
How we built it
We leveraged the use of Raspberry Pi and Arduino to build a fully-functioning Smart Bin, made of sustainable and reused materials such as old cardboard, to create an easily-replicable, simple yet effective smart sorting system.
Challenges we ran into
We didn't have a raspberry Pi camera that we could use to get a video feed!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We thought about a series of ideas, and settled on trying to use our phones to get a video feed instead. We managed to use an app called DroidCam to turn our phones into IP Cameras and get the video feed in the RPi using OpenCV over the wi-fi network.
What we learned
Besides several hardware related skills, we also learned how to leverage an IoT framework to provide a multi-pronged approach to dealing with the recycling problem. Besides our Smart Bin Cap, we also have a website that provides several functionalities such as recycling bin locator, sustainability chatbot as well as an updated news feed that provides several relevant, and up-to-date articles about recycling and sustainability
What's next for The Bin5.0 Environment
We will add several other extensible functionalities to our project such as a detailed analytics system that is personalised for each user, a social feature where one can compare their 'recycling score' with their friends as a sort of gamification.
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