Introduction: Intelligent Trash Can

In today's world, people are often too "lazy" to walk ten extra steps to the trash can. They litter the locations around them. This project is just the motivation they need to make it to the trash can. We present to you the Intelligent Trash can! This is a trash can, specially for glass and plastic bottles, which actually pays you to throw your trash in them! This project aims to achieve three fold benefits:

1> It will reduce the plastic pollution in the environment.

2> It actually pays the people to clean up the society, so the people are happy

3> We get a trash full of JUST recyclable materials - glass bottles and plastic! Segregation of wastes into recyclable and non recyclable materials is one of the worst problems of cleaning up huge dumping grounds, and here we get people to do it themselves!

Materials and components required : An LDR Sensor, A proximity sensor, A bolt iot board, some connecting wires and a couple of resistors.

Step 1: Configuring the Bolt Platform

An LDR sensor is a light sensitive sensor whose resistance depends on the intensity of light falling on it. A proximity sensor can detect an obstruction in its path while a bolt Internet of Things platform is an Iot board which is easily available on http://www.boltiot.com . The basic aim is to create a smart dustbin which can detect recyclable bottles thrown into it and and send talktime rewards to the mobile numbers of the users after taking the number as input. This would encourage people to use dustbins and recycle waste materials.

The first step is to configure your bolt platform. First build a Hot spot network and make sure your laptop/computer and bolt are both connected over it. You can build the Hot-spot network through your mobile phone. To configure the bolt, connect the sd card to your computer through a card reader and open the BS.txt file and ensure that the ssid and password are same as the hotspot. Now, connect your laptop to the same hotspot and find out the IP address of the bolt using Advanced IP scanner. Just put the name and password of the Hot-spot network in the ssid and password space respectively. Then check the IP of your bolt using any IP scanner software. For linux, just typing arp -a command in the terminal will provide the IP.

Lets say your bolt's IP address is xxx.yyy.zzz.aaa . Then open your browser and go to xxx.yyy.zzz.aaa/developer.

Click on the configure button on the bolt homepage. This is the page which you will be using to upload codes to your Bolt.

Step 2: Getting the Interface Figured Out

You can input your phone number to the Dustbin using the interface. In this prototype we use a HTML form to input the user's phone number as input.

The bolt iot board uses a HTML based interface and can get commands in javascript. A fluency in these programming languages does help, but you can always learn on the go, as you do the project.

We create a HTML form and a button. The user's phone number is taken as a string input. We will tag this string input as we will need to access it later in the code.

Refer the code for more clarity.

Physical Connections of LDR to Bolt First connect any one pin of LDR to GND and other pin of LDR to A0 of BOLT.Then connect any one of the resistor to 5V and the otehr pin of resister to pin A0 of BOLT.

Step 3: Preparing the Make-shift Transparency Detector

This is the part where the Dustbin actually gets smart. We exploit the fact that most bottles are transparent, or near transparent. We use a combination of a proximity sensor and an IR sensor to detect if the user has input a transparent bottle or not.

We fix the proximity sensor and the LDR-LED setup as show in the schematic

The code will use a combination of both to detect if there is a transparent bottle. Since the bottle is nearby, the Proximity sensor gives an output of 0, and the LDR gives a 0 output if the object inserted is transparent. We apply some boolean algebra to get an expression which becomes true only when the object inserted is transparent. Hence there is a pretty high chance that the object here is a plastic or glass bottle.

Step 4: Getting It All Together

We finally connect all the modules together. The bolt IOT code right now does not contain the functionality for a direct e-recharge on the user's phone, but it is aimed at the same idea. Upload the IOT code using the bolt configuration page and voila! You got your own smart Dustbin.

Step 5: The Code

Here is the code of the project.

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