The Filled Unit Notifier (FUN)

Twelve floors, a garbage bin each. Cleaners waste time checking which are full. What if your phone told you which bins need emptying? Get alerts, save time, and skip the guesswork with the F.U.N.

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Inspiration

We were sitting in the Tall Timber Room and saw a janitor open a trash bin, see that it was empty, and then leave. We thought — what if they could just message their phone, like the TransLink app, and sign up to get notified when a trash can is full? They could also see every bin in a building and its status.

What It Does

Our app scans a trash can and measures whether it is full or not based on ultrasonic sensors. It then sends the bin’s status to a Flask server, which updates our database with this information. Users can message a number and subscribe to certain bins to receive notifications every 20 minutes about their status, or send a request to see all bins’ statuses or a specific bin’s status.

How We Built It

We used a Raspberry Pi and ultrasonic sensors for the hardware side. We used a Flask server and Twilio for real-time messaging, and a PostgreSQL database to keep track of the current status of each trash can along with the trashcans users would receive notifications about. We also used Java to create a terminal-based UI for interacting with the PostgreSQL database.

Challenges We Ran Into

Hardware Challenges
Our sensors sometimes sent false readings due to the reflection inside the bin. We used a counter to ensure the value was consistent during a 15-second phase to confirm whether the bin was empty or full.

Software Challenges
We ran into issues where our trashcans, phone messaging service, and our SQL database could not communicate with each other. The issue became really bad when we had the servers on different networks, and became impossible when connecting to the BCIT secure network. This was solved by using ngrok, a service used to forward certain ports through an online service, and the issue disappeared completely.

Accomplishments That We’re Proud Of

We built a reliable system to communicate with our phones and get live data. We found a way to save time by turning off the Raspberry Pi while trash is being changed and restarting it afterward. We also added a clean terminal-based UI/UX for the database. A janitor even told us this would help them a lot and gave us props.

What We Learned

We learned how to use Postman and test API calls. We also learned how four people can work on different components and still stay on the same page.

What’s Next for the FUN

We want to upgrade our sensors to more reliable models. We also plan to add more devices and collect additional data to improve our project. We would love to make the system cheaper and more resilient so more of them could be deployed at a much lower cost. We would also love to make the back-end system more reliable and easier to setup so anyone could deploy a FUN.


More technical documentation can be found within the GitHub repository's readme file.

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