I live in the EU, where I have five separate waste streams: glass, paper, plastic/metal, RVM plastic, and general trash. They all fill at different rates, while the collection schedule is essentially nondeterministic. The only reliable signal is that they arrive at 6 a.m. sharp in trucks specifically engineered to maximize acoustic output.
My solution is similarly overengineered: a vision system combined with an olfactory system feeds into a biological neural network, which monitors the bins and determines when intervention is required.
The neural network is annoyingly power-hungry, occasionally unreliable, and has yet to support OTA firmware updates. I also have a Home Assistant as a backup for when the neural network fails. It provides a gentle nudge that perhaps the bins need taking out.
> The only reliable signal is that they arrive at 6 a.m. sharp in trucks specifically engineered to maximize acoustic output.
This gave me a chuckle. It seems almost every where in the world this is true. Ofcourse it is quiet outside around that time, amplifying the effect, but I am always amazed why loud things always need to happen so early. Maybe I should become a morning person, but prefer dark, silent nights for concentration.
In my area half the issue is cars being parked on the way, which is why the truck has to approach the bins in reverse, which is particularly loud.
The other half is buildings being spaced 7m apart, because that's the minimum allowable at this height. The echo is enormous.
That being said it's still more tolerable than the people absolutely punching it through our 30km/h street with their modified exhausts and windows rolled down - as if the point for them was to lose hearing as fast as possible.
So we have organic waste (food scraps, etc; green bin), recycling (blue), and everything else ("garbage"; black). Organics/green gets picked up every week, blue and black alternate (always on the same day: so one week green+blue, next week green+black).
For hazardous stuff you take it to a depot or wait for a city community event nearby:
This past year the provincial government made it so that municipalities do not have to handle recycling anymore, but it is now the responsibility of the manufacturers ("producer responsibility model")
No, he's referring to using the human body, brain, and nose to figure out when to take the trash out to the street, with Home Assistant giving a reminder.
Please elaborate and educate us. I might be missing a stream but where I live we have three. But most people ignore any rules AND complain when costs go up.
Same for Germany, but those don't get picked up, you go and throw them into different bins at a collection point (which is why you usually have all the glass in one bag). I'd say Germany has way more separation than Zürich. We have 4-5 at most.
> Home Assistant already knows which bins (trash cans, for the international readers) are due for collection. [...] What it can’t tell me is whether I’ve actually done anything about it.
My first gut reaction to this was: Have you tried using a vision-language model?
I used to have an elaborate Home Assistant setup with tons of zigbee sensors here and there telling me if front door is not closed properly, if the rice cooker is left on (via current monitoring), if the garage door is left open (with a magnetic contact sensor), if window is left open, if the soil is dry, etc. I had to keep changing batteries of all these things and manage flaky Zigbee connections in the past.
More recently, I've found the absolute most reliable, ~zero-maintainence solution to be an LLM. Home Assistant already has an LLM plugin, you can wire it up to a local LLM if you want, and you can just feed it an image and ask "Is this garage door open or closed" and I found that to be much better for my sanity than changing batteries every 6 months and dealing with flaky sensors sending me false alerts.
I even found it useful for "Did the cat vomit on the floor" (if so notify me and pause the cleaning robot schedule) and "Do any plants look like they need attention"
For TFA's use case, if you already have a security camera facing front, you can just feed it that image and ask "Are the garbage bins out"
Also, if you're worried about cameras sending home images to the cloud, there are non-cloud options. (I use Unifi cameras and Home Assistant gets a RTSP stream over LAN.)
Yah, this is how I've solved this in my Home Assistant setup. My doorbell camera can see where I keep my bins when they're not out. We have three types of bins- a trash bin, a recycle bin, and two yard waste bins. Recycling and yard waste are picked up on alternate weeks, and I often forget which bins need to go out.
I have an automation that will grab an image from that camera and send it to the Anthropic API with a prompt describing where the bins are, and the color of each bin. The prompt comes back with JSON indicating which bins it can see. If it can see e.g. the yard waste bin, and it's time to take the yard waste bin to the curb, it will send me a notification.
It also reminds me when it's time to return them to their "resting" position after pickup- unless I already have.
Home Assistant orchestrates this all. I also have it hooked up to a "Bindicator"- a white 3D printed bin with a color-changing LED inside, controlled by an ESP8266 using ESPHome. When it's time to move the bin it lights up the color of the bin that needs to be moved. If I haven't moved the bins back after a day it turns orange to remind me.
Claude configured the automations for me via MCP but it's not particularly complicated. It's pretty reliable, though sometimes just because of where the doorbell camera is it can't clearly see the bins. If it can't make a ruling on the bin location it just falls back to notifying me so I will sometimes get a reminder I don't need.
I found all of this device, software, and battery management exhausting to the point where it was harder than just remembering if I closed the door or noticed that the cat puked on the carpet overnight. I let it all go and just lived like a normal person and everything got easier.
> how often do you have to change your cameras' batteries, or are you accepting ugly wiring for powering from mains
Meh (a) I want security and cat-monitoring cameras anyway (b) I'm willing to take the effort to install cameras neatly since they're capable of serving as 100 different sensors
> constantly sending images of one's private space to a cloud LLM is Orwellian
I agree. I have a local server with a GPU. The security side of things records to a local NVR. Nothing goes to the cloud.
> IP cameras are flaky, too
haven't had nearly as many problems here
> are you polling your LLM minutewise "Did the cat vomit on the floor"?
Kind of, but it only re-polls if the camera detected motion, and then every 15 minutes as a catch-all.
Honestly if I could figure out how to fix my problems in this area it would be worth my time, do you have any suggestions?
I don't have a problem with short or long term memory, in certain contexts. I can hold entire problem definitions and codebases in my head while working, but I often set down my keys on the way to pick up my water bottle and get to my car only to have no idea where they are. I can remember details of specifications, language features, video game mechanics, etc. for years, but often can't remember someone's name.
There's a whole cottage industry of social media telling me this is ADHD but I don't know if that's real or just for clicks, and if I can improve these issues.
> Honestly if I could figure out how to fix my problems in this area it would be worth my time, do you have any suggestions?
Many, having unfortunately been all the way at the worst-version of that – and figured out the way back.
No guarantees I can help, obviously, but this rhymes with the types of intermittency I dealt with (if you start going into rooms and forgetting what you went in for, that really sucks and is not “normal” - despite being common.)
Give a way to reach you?
If you’re motivated, you can probably optimize.
If the author is reading this, I did a ctrl-f in your writeup for "battery" and "life" and didn't find anything specific about how long the batteries on these last. Can you elaborate a bit more on the battery types in use and lifespan? Charging? Since use lithium? 18650? CR2032 or CR2477 size coin cells? Any other details would be very interesting to read.
My biggest barrier to doing something like thins in my home automation setups is that I already have an extensive schedule of things that need periodic disposable battery changes (like CR2477 cells in zigbee humidity/temperature sensors), and I'm really hesitant to add even more into my house. In addition to things like battery-backed smoke detectors in every bedroom, etc, which need periodic 9V replacements on a schedule.
In fact I've started looking at going the opposite direction, where I can run a cat5e cable from my utility room, down and across the ceiling of my basement, and come up in a location where I can install an 802.3af to arbitrary DC voltage DC-DC converter (3.3, 5VDC, 12VDC out, or similar) as a PoE splitter, to make some of these things not dependent on batteries. Same idea as how you can find 9V or AA battery to direct DC wiring "dummy battery" battery eliminators now. Obviously such an approach wouldn't work for garbage bins but that's how much I am trying to eliminate having dozens of batteries to replace, as they're already all over the place with window and door sensors.
> In addition to things like battery-backed smoke detectors in every bedroom, etc, which need periodic 9V replacements on a schedule.
Just as aside, lithium-battery powered smoke detectors are a godsend. The battery lifespan lasts the recommended life span of the detector, i.e. around 10 years.
No battery replacements needed, although you still ought to test them once in a while.
In Scotland, building regulations now mandate sealed-in lithium batteries (and interlinking) on fire alarms. Which is annoying, given most smart systems still have replaceable batteries.
It’s in there, specifically noting that I am going to be watching that over the coming weeks.
The BLE tags I previously used lasted about 2 years of a CR2045. These are much larger CRs, and I have tuned it right down on the report timing when stationary, so I am anticipating more than 2 years.
You can also find variants of them that are microUSB or USB-C power out. Finding ones that are natively 3.3V or 5VDC out is more difficult and rare, it seems the most viable option if I do this is to buy a very tiny DC-DC converter that's 12VDC in and then 3.3 or 5VDC out, and glue/stick it to the poe splitter, perhaps in an enclosure of some sort. Then wires out to the battery dummy eliminator.
The thing above is a 'dumb' device so any monitoring of the power you would have to do from your 802.3af PoE switch, entirely depending on what model/capabilities your switch has for port status, wattage, etc.
edit: Google "USB AA battery eliminator" and you'll find products which have a USB-A male input, expect standard 5V USB input, and output either 1.5V, 3.0V or 4.5V or 6V (1S, 2S or 3S or 4S AA battery voltage). You could then plug one of those into the many 802.3af to USB-A female (5V2A) poe splitters which exist on the market. Example: https://www.amazon.com/Battery-Eliminator-Supply-Adapter-Rep...
I forgot to mention that in some cases if replacing a single AA battery as a 'battery eliminator' you would need native 1.5VDC out. Tiny 12V to 1.5V DC-DC converter do exist. Same idea for 12V to 9V battery. It looks like a fair number of the small ones I'm seeing on mouser and digikey are meant to be soldered onto a board as part of a larger project, but I don't see why they wouldn't work if soldered directly to a couple of wires coming from the 12V out of a poe splitter such as that.
This is one of the problems where I think a simple camera or two would suffice.
Years ago I worked as a consultant on a projects which is quite similar to this, but larger scale and involving moving machinery. The task was basically to come up with sensors that would register when and which machines would be at what place in a structure. In the end we came up with a solution which only involved cameras and object detection...this was before AlexNet etc., so fun times with classical machine learning.
If position were measured instead of range this could be used to document activities-of-daily-living, for the elderly or to measure health information for anyone (humans or pets). Precision location could be used to detect cooking, fridge visits, bathroom visits, exercise, time in bed, possibly time sleeping, overall activity (or lack thereof, possibly indicating a health decline if extended over a long time), and more. There has been research on trying to do this with accelerometers and RFID tags, possibly recent research has tried UWB tags.
In my case, one of the external cameras points at where the bins normally reside. Each has a distinct colour. I wrote a simple algo that bins colours on the image coming from the camera, and, accounting for things like direct sunlight skewing the distribution, tells me which bins are currently on the street. That was pre-LLM age, these days I would have told claude to write that thing for me. Works as a charm, no batteries nor maintenance of any type. Runs on pyscript.
I bought a bunch of UWB boards 2 years ago for a POC with a transit company, that didn't materialise.
I like the tech, and would like to do something with the boards. We only have 1 bin, and as others point out, I could just ask HA if the bin is out on the street on Friday morning (already have cameras around the house).
I've thought of a garage door opener that senses when the car is home. I would still like to do something public though, just not sure what.
I have a transit info app at bus stops, so maybe a bus aware arrival board, but GPS solves that problem better, and the UWB devices would just get stolen anyways.
Interestingly I’ve used Zigbee for well over a decade, tried easily over a hundred different devices, built others homes, and I’d never encountered this battery size until this project!
Well that’s fascinating. The answer is a small amount was Claude written, like one of the image captions when I had it find the render and insert it, and I had it do a brief grammar and spelling check, but very little. Most of those chunks that tool has flagged were 100% handwritten.
FWIW, we've been finding that tools like grammar checkers far more imprints on text than people intend when they use them (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). It is one of the two most common reasons why text gets classified as genai even when the author didn't use tools to generate their text. (The other is automatic translators.)
That’s all well and good until the truck driver operating the mechanical arm drops your bin into the truck. Spoiler alert: the bin will not be fished out, it is now garbage.
So those tags are going to have to be a little cheaper before I’ll use them. :-)
Not the whole bin, but the operator managed to scrape off the hinged lid and both wheels from my recycling bin a few weeks back. Sent them photos and they sent me a new one.
I had that happen to me once. My bin had a broken wheel so I'm not sure if it was a mistake, they did it to help me out, or if they somehow did additional damage and took it. They gave me a new one without having to contact anyone so they knew they did it.
Yeah, our city’s new garbage contractor is kinda crap. After three weeks of no new bin (“You’ll get a new one on Tuesday.” “Which Tuesday?”), I sent the city solid waste manager after them. Next day, new bin. :-)
Hmmmm. Idt UWB needed for this. Just good old Bluetooth beacons/rssi. Oh and I think BTLE 5.6 or ish actually has UWB like positioning built in down to centimetres AFAIK. And they're SUPER low power.
A cheaper solution is some vibration sensors. Ignore short vibrations (putting garbage in). Several seconds of vibration on trash night mean you've put it out. Big vibration on trash day means they picked it up. And then one more long one when you roll it back in later that day.
> Or the bin’s precise location - how many fixed reference points would I need to triangulate it on a 2D plane?
Back in 2019 I worked for a company (in San Diego) that added UWB-based positioning to the 7 train line in NYC.
The code I wrote ran on what was basically a combined Raspberry Pi 3 compute module connected to a UWB device installed into the train's bonnet which would ping UWB devices set along the track side to determine the position of the train.
In most situations I could get a unique position based on only two beacons, but I had the benefit of the trains being on one of a limited number of fixed tracks which severely limited where they could practically be in space... well, assuming there hadn't been a train derailment.
The system didn't work in a 2D plane, though, our surveyed track data and track side UWB positions were all 3D encoded as ECEF coordinates.
In some situations depending upon track layout you needed more than 2 beacons to determine the correct position if you were just sampling single points in isolation, but since you're working with a continuous stream of changed positions as the train ran along the track at predictable speeds, you could pretty easily figure out which of multiple possibilities it had to be based on what came before even if you had potential multi-positional results for the current sample.
Of course, we would use as many of the track side beacons as we could see to strengthen confidence in the positioning, and the beacons were placed so we could generally see a good 4-6 of them most of the time.
Snow was the biggest challenge for the system, in a heavy thick snow the UWB signals bounce all over the place and you get severe multipath effects that can make it pretty difficult to determine which is the true line of sight signal for your time of flight calculations.
Fun job, I had to get certified to be able to walk the NYC train tracks because we installed a lot of the track side beacons ourselves, and I spent a lot of late nights doing live testing runs on trains that were empty other than a couple of people from our company and some MTA workers assigned to our test trains.
Thanks. I regret not taking more pictures during the initial testing indoors. I should document these things better, I only think about writing them up when it’s too late
I'd just do it with camera and some rudimentary image recognition, having bin present/absent (in process of being taken care of) signal should've been enough
Seems like a fun project but ultimately not worth it. Just setup a calendar alert to remind you to put the bins out and pull them back in, they're usually picked up on a schedule so it couldn't be too difficult to figure out when to go pull them back to the house.
I live in the EU, where I have five separate waste streams: glass, paper, plastic/metal, RVM plastic, and general trash. They all fill at different rates, while the collection schedule is essentially nondeterministic. The only reliable signal is that they arrive at 6 a.m. sharp in trucks specifically engineered to maximize acoustic output.
My solution is similarly overengineered: a vision system combined with an olfactory system feeds into a biological neural network, which monitors the bins and determines when intervention is required.
The neural network is annoyingly power-hungry, occasionally unreliable, and has yet to support OTA firmware updates. I also have a Home Assistant as a backup for when the neural network fails. It provides a gentle nudge that perhaps the bins need taking out.
Shocking, I know.
> The only reliable signal is that they arrive at 6 a.m. sharp in trucks specifically engineered to maximize acoustic output.
This gave me a chuckle. It seems almost every where in the world this is true. Ofcourse it is quiet outside around that time, amplifying the effect, but I am always amazed why loud things always need to happen so early. Maybe I should become a morning person, but prefer dark, silent nights for concentration.
In my area half the issue is cars being parked on the way, which is why the truck has to approach the bins in reverse, which is particularly loud.
The other half is buildings being spaced 7m apart, because that's the minimum allowable at this height. The echo is enormous.
That being said it's still more tolerable than the people absolutely punching it through our 30km/h street with their modified exhausts and windows rolled down - as if the point for them was to lose hearing as fast as possible.
> I live in the EU, where I have five separate waste streams: glass, paper, plastic/metal, RVM plastic, and general trash.
In Toronto, Canada (and Ontario generally?) we use single-stream recycling:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-stream_recycling
So we have organic waste (food scraps, etc; green bin), recycling (blue), and everything else ("garbage"; black). Organics/green gets picked up every week, blue and black alternate (always on the same day: so one week green+blue, next week green+black).
For hazardous stuff you take it to a depot or wait for a city community event nearby:
* https://www.toronto.ca/services-payments/recycling-organics-...
This past year the provincial government made it so that municipalities do not have to handle recycling anymore, but it is now the responsibility of the manufacturers ("producer responsibility model")
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_in_Canada#Ontario
* https://www.circularmaterials.ca/what-is-epr/
Is there a reason why all these separate streams are used where you live?
I see several reasons listed in the first link in your comment.
LOL, you’re taking about OpenClaw, right? The neural network not only takes out the bins but also starts posting on HN
No, he's referring to using the human body, brain, and nose to figure out when to take the trash out to the street, with Home Assistant giving a reminder.
I know, just LOL. My “home assistant” would frown at me for the “home assistant” epitheton.
Just 5? Lucky you, here (depending on how you count) we're doing 13 fractions.
Please elaborate and educate us. I might be missing a stream but where I live we have three. But most people ignore any rules AND complain when costs go up.
That’s nuts. Where is ‘here’?
Sounds like Switzerland - different bin for each colour of glass - at least in Zürich.
Same for Germany, but those don't get picked up, you go and throw them into different bins at a collection point (which is why you usually have all the glass in one bag). I'd say Germany has way more separation than Zürich. We have 4-5 at most.
> The neural network is annoyingly power-hungry,
I don't think it's power hungry at all! Benchmark it's energy use against SOTA, you will be surprised.
> Home Assistant already knows which bins (trash cans, for the international readers) are due for collection. [...] What it can’t tell me is whether I’ve actually done anything about it.
My first gut reaction to this was: Have you tried using a vision-language model?
I used to have an elaborate Home Assistant setup with tons of zigbee sensors here and there telling me if front door is not closed properly, if the rice cooker is left on (via current monitoring), if the garage door is left open (with a magnetic contact sensor), if window is left open, if the soil is dry, etc. I had to keep changing batteries of all these things and manage flaky Zigbee connections in the past.
More recently, I've found the absolute most reliable, ~zero-maintainence solution to be an LLM. Home Assistant already has an LLM plugin, you can wire it up to a local LLM if you want, and you can just feed it an image and ask "Is this garage door open or closed" and I found that to be much better for my sanity than changing batteries every 6 months and dealing with flaky sensors sending me false alerts.
I even found it useful for "Did the cat vomit on the floor" (if so notify me and pause the cleaning robot schedule) and "Do any plants look like they need attention"
For TFA's use case, if you already have a security camera facing front, you can just feed it that image and ask "Are the garbage bins out"
Also, if you're worried about cameras sending home images to the cloud, there are non-cloud options. (I use Unifi cameras and Home Assistant gets a RTSP stream over LAN.)
Yah, this is how I've solved this in my Home Assistant setup. My doorbell camera can see where I keep my bins when they're not out. We have three types of bins- a trash bin, a recycle bin, and two yard waste bins. Recycling and yard waste are picked up on alternate weeks, and I often forget which bins need to go out.
I have an automation that will grab an image from that camera and send it to the Anthropic API with a prompt describing where the bins are, and the color of each bin. The prompt comes back with JSON indicating which bins it can see. If it can see e.g. the yard waste bin, and it's time to take the yard waste bin to the curb, it will send me a notification.
It also reminds me when it's time to return them to their "resting" position after pickup- unless I already have.
Home Assistant orchestrates this all. I also have it hooked up to a "Bindicator"- a white 3D printed bin with a color-changing LED inside, controlled by an ESP8266 using ESPHome. When it's time to move the bin it lights up the color of the bin that needs to be moved. If I haven't moved the bins back after a day it turns orange to remind me.
Claude configured the automations for me via MCP but it's not particularly complicated. It's pretty reliable, though sometimes just because of where the doorbell camera is it can't clearly see the bins. If it can't make a ruling on the bin location it just falls back to notifying me so I will sometimes get a reminder I don't need.
I found all of this device, software, and battery management exhausting to the point where it was harder than just remembering if I closed the door or noticed that the cat puked on the carpet overnight. I let it all go and just lived like a normal person and everything got easier.
- I have to change batteries of zigbee devices maybe every three years or so
- how often do you have to change your cameras' batteries, or are you accepting ugly wiring for powering from mains?
- how many cameras do you have installed to cover your home?
- IP cameras are flaky, too
- constantly sending images of one's private space to a cloud LLM is Orwellian
- are you polling your LLM minutewise "Did the cat vomit on the floor"?
> how often do you have to change your cameras' batteries, or are you accepting ugly wiring for powering from mains
Meh (a) I want security and cat-monitoring cameras anyway (b) I'm willing to take the effort to install cameras neatly since they're capable of serving as 100 different sensors
> constantly sending images of one's private space to a cloud LLM is Orwellian
I agree. I have a local server with a GPU. The security side of things records to a local NVR. Nothing goes to the cloud.
> IP cameras are flaky, too
haven't had nearly as many problems here
> are you polling your LLM minutewise "Did the cat vomit on the floor"?
Kind of, but it only re-polls if the camera detected motion, and then every 15 minutes as a catch-all.
agreed it's Orwellian. fortunately, open-weight VLMs you can run on a Mac mini or a strix Halo are more than adequate for this task.
PoE cameras solve all of the cameras problems. Just drag a cable, it's one time bother and if you're clever it won't be any uglier than camera itself
Kinda liking this idea :)
I’ve not played with vision models much. I did some experiments with OpenCV and Processing many years ago, but times have changed.
I think you just wrote me next weekend project ;)
Yeah, when it comes to sensors wired power (or solar power I guess) is absolute minimum, it's extra effort that's always pays off.
My first-gut reaction was:
why are so few hacking their cognitive abilities (basic short-term memory)?
Honestly if I could figure out how to fix my problems in this area it would be worth my time, do you have any suggestions?
I don't have a problem with short or long term memory, in certain contexts. I can hold entire problem definitions and codebases in my head while working, but I often set down my keys on the way to pick up my water bottle and get to my car only to have no idea where they are. I can remember details of specifications, language features, video game mechanics, etc. for years, but often can't remember someone's name.
There's a whole cottage industry of social media telling me this is ADHD but I don't know if that's real or just for clicks, and if I can improve these issues.
That just sounds like short vs long term memory
> Honestly if I could figure out how to fix my problems in this area it would be worth my time, do you have any suggestions?
Many, having unfortunately been all the way at the worst-version of that – and figured out the way back.
No guarantees I can help, obviously, but this rhymes with the types of intermittency I dealt with (if you start going into rooms and forgetting what you went in for, that really sucks and is not “normal” - despite being common.)
Give a way to reach you? If you’re motivated, you can probably optimize.
If the author is reading this, I did a ctrl-f in your writeup for "battery" and "life" and didn't find anything specific about how long the batteries on these last. Can you elaborate a bit more on the battery types in use and lifespan? Charging? Since use lithium? 18650? CR2032 or CR2477 size coin cells? Any other details would be very interesting to read.
My biggest barrier to doing something like thins in my home automation setups is that I already have an extensive schedule of things that need periodic disposable battery changes (like CR2477 cells in zigbee humidity/temperature sensors), and I'm really hesitant to add even more into my house. In addition to things like battery-backed smoke detectors in every bedroom, etc, which need periodic 9V replacements on a schedule.
In fact I've started looking at going the opposite direction, where I can run a cat5e cable from my utility room, down and across the ceiling of my basement, and come up in a location where I can install an 802.3af to arbitrary DC voltage DC-DC converter (3.3, 5VDC, 12VDC out, or similar) as a PoE splitter, to make some of these things not dependent on batteries. Same idea as how you can find 9V or AA battery to direct DC wiring "dummy battery" battery eliminators now. Obviously such an approach wouldn't work for garbage bins but that's how much I am trying to eliminate having dozens of batteries to replace, as they're already all over the place with window and door sensors.
> In addition to things like battery-backed smoke detectors in every bedroom, etc, which need periodic 9V replacements on a schedule.
Just as aside, lithium-battery powered smoke detectors are a godsend. The battery lifespan lasts the recommended life span of the detector, i.e. around 10 years. No battery replacements needed, although you still ought to test them once in a while.
In Scotland, building regulations now mandate sealed-in lithium batteries (and interlinking) on fire alarms. Which is annoying, given most smart systems still have replaceable batteries.
It’s in there, specifically noting that I am going to be watching that over the coming weeks.
The BLE tags I previously used lasted about 2 years of a CR2045. These are much larger CRs, and I have tuned it right down on the report timing when stationary, so I am anticipating more than 2 years.
What hardware do you recommend for 802.3af to arbitrary DC power? Granular configuration and remote monitoring are considerations in my use cases.
These same ones from China are sold under like 40 different brand names:
https://www.amazon.com/Splitter-Compliant-Surveillance-5-5x2...?
You can also find variants of them that are microUSB or USB-C power out. Finding ones that are natively 3.3V or 5VDC out is more difficult and rare, it seems the most viable option if I do this is to buy a very tiny DC-DC converter that's 12VDC in and then 3.3 or 5VDC out, and glue/stick it to the poe splitter, perhaps in an enclosure of some sort. Then wires out to the battery dummy eliminator.
The thing above is a 'dumb' device so any monitoring of the power you would have to do from your 802.3af PoE switch, entirely depending on what model/capabilities your switch has for port status, wattage, etc.
edit: Google "USB AA battery eliminator" and you'll find products which have a USB-A male input, expect standard 5V USB input, and output either 1.5V, 3.0V or 4.5V or 6V (1S, 2S or 3S or 4S AA battery voltage). You could then plug one of those into the many 802.3af to USB-A female (5V2A) poe splitters which exist on the market. Example: https://www.amazon.com/Battery-Eliminator-Supply-Adapter-Rep...
Many thanks.
I forgot to mention that in some cases if replacing a single AA battery as a 'battery eliminator' you would need native 1.5VDC out. Tiny 12V to 1.5V DC-DC converter do exist. Same idea for 12V to 9V battery. It looks like a fair number of the small ones I'm seeing on mouser and digikey are meant to be soldered onto a board as part of a larger project, but I don't see why they wouldn't work if soldered directly to a couple of wires coming from the 12V out of a poe splitter such as that.
This is great fun. For where I live I decided to "under engineer" a solution that required 0 Turing Machines: https://blog.jgc.org/2024/09/i-made-rubbish-clock.html
That’s beautiful. As is the mentioned Bindicator!
This is one of the problems where I think a simple camera or two would suffice.
Years ago I worked as a consultant on a projects which is quite similar to this, but larger scale and involving moving machinery. The task was basically to come up with sensors that would register when and which machines would be at what place in a structure. In the end we came up with a solution which only involved cameras and object detection...this was before AlexNet etc., so fun times with classical machine learning.
Yes, and don't call me Shirley!
If position were measured instead of range this could be used to document activities-of-daily-living, for the elderly or to measure health information for anyone (humans or pets). Precision location could be used to detect cooking, fridge visits, bathroom visits, exercise, time in bed, possibly time sleeping, overall activity (or lack thereof, possibly indicating a health decline if extended over a long time), and more. There has been research on trying to do this with accelerometers and RFID tags, possibly recent research has tried UWB tags.
In my case, one of the external cameras points at where the bins normally reside. Each has a distinct colour. I wrote a simple algo that bins colours on the image coming from the camera, and, accounting for things like direct sunlight skewing the distribution, tells me which bins are currently on the street. That was pre-LLM age, these days I would have told claude to write that thing for me. Works as a charm, no batteries nor maintenance of any type. Runs on pyscript.
A related over-engineered project for residential trash management:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34216415
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
Trash Train: I put my trash cans on rails so they move automatically [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34216415 - Jan 2023 (87 comments)
I bought a bunch of UWB boards 2 years ago for a POC with a transit company, that didn't materialise.
I like the tech, and would like to do something with the boards. We only have 1 bin, and as others point out, I could just ask HA if the bin is out on the street on Friday morning (already have cameras around the house).
I've thought of a garage door opener that senses when the car is home. I would still like to do something public though, just not sure what.
I have a transit info app at bus stops, so maybe a bus aware arrival board, but GPS solves that problem better, and the UWB devices would just get stolen anyways.
How much of this was written with/edited by an LLM? Some parts of it feel somewhat Claude-ish, and I’m very curious if that’s a false positive.
Super cool work! I had no idea UWB tags had gotten so cheap, or that CR2077 was a size.
I don't think CR2077 is a size, it may be a typo for CR2477 which is very common?
CR2477 is high enough capacity that it's used in a number of zigbee or zwave800 based products that have no wired interface.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=cr2477+ba...
https://aichiplink.com/blog/CR-Battery-Sizes-and-Specificati...
It is indeed a typo! Thanks.
Interestingly I’ve used Zigbee for well over a decade, tried easily over a hundred different devices, built others homes, and I’d never encountered this battery size until this project!
Will fix the typo later
Over half, apparently. https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector/49947472
Well that’s fascinating. The answer is a small amount was Claude written, like one of the image captions when I had it find the render and insert it, and I had it do a brief grammar and spelling check, but very little. Most of those chunks that tool has flagged were 100% handwritten.
FWIW, we've been finding that tools like grammar checkers far more imprints on text than people intend when they use them (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). It is one of the two most common reasons why text gets classified as genai even when the author didn't use tools to generate their text. (The other is automatic translators.)
s/claude/codex
That’s all well and good until the truck driver operating the mechanical arm drops your bin into the truck. Spoiler alert: the bin will not be fished out, it is now garbage.
So those tags are going to have to be a little cheaper before I’ll use them. :-)
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that happening to someone!
Luckily these are only £5 each https://www.alibaba.com/x/1lBJtin?ck=pdp
The majority of cost is the wrover and the programming jig (which I think the manufacturer built to order, it’s very… home brew
Not the whole bin, but the operator managed to scrape off the hinged lid and both wheels from my recycling bin a few weeks back. Sent them photos and they sent me a new one.
I had that happen to me once. My bin had a broken wheel so I'm not sure if it was a mistake, they did it to help me out, or if they somehow did additional damage and took it. They gave me a new one without having to contact anyone so they knew they did it.
Yeah, our city’s new garbage contractor is kinda crap. After three weeks of no new bin (“You’ll get a new one on Tuesday.” “Which Tuesday?”), I sent the city solid waste manager after them. Next day, new bin. :-)
Transmitters on the bins seems cumbersome and expensive. I would use metal tape on the bin to complete a circuit on the fence.
Then I can overengineer the fensor circuit! Ultralow power, bin recognition, alarms, fox nerfs, auto-lids and so on.
I'd like one surging with ultra high power for when people try and fill my recycling bin with random trash
Hmmmm. Idt UWB needed for this. Just good old Bluetooth beacons/rssi. Oh and I think BTLE 5.6 or ish actually has UWB like positioning built in down to centimetres AFAIK. And they're SUPER low power.
A cheaper solution is some vibration sensors. Ignore short vibrations (putting garbage in). Several seconds of vibration on trash night mean you've put it out. Big vibration on trash day means they picked it up. And then one more long one when you roll it back in later that day.
> Or the bin’s precise location - how many fixed reference points would I need to triangulate it on a 2D plane?
Back in 2019 I worked for a company (in San Diego) that added UWB-based positioning to the 7 train line in NYC.
The code I wrote ran on what was basically a combined Raspberry Pi 3 compute module connected to a UWB device installed into the train's bonnet which would ping UWB devices set along the track side to determine the position of the train.
In most situations I could get a unique position based on only two beacons, but I had the benefit of the trains being on one of a limited number of fixed tracks which severely limited where they could practically be in space... well, assuming there hadn't been a train derailment.
The system didn't work in a 2D plane, though, our surveyed track data and track side UWB positions were all 3D encoded as ECEF coordinates.
In some situations depending upon track layout you needed more than 2 beacons to determine the correct position if you were just sampling single points in isolation, but since you're working with a continuous stream of changed positions as the train ran along the track at predictable speeds, you could pretty easily figure out which of multiple possibilities it had to be based on what came before even if you had potential multi-positional results for the current sample.
Of course, we would use as many of the track side beacons as we could see to strengthen confidence in the positioning, and the beacons were placed so we could generally see a good 4-6 of them most of the time.
Snow was the biggest challenge for the system, in a heavy thick snow the UWB signals bounce all over the place and you get severe multipath effects that can make it pretty difficult to determine which is the true line of sight signal for your time of flight calculations.
Fun job, I had to get certified to be able to walk the NYC train tracks because we installed a lot of the track side beacons ourselves, and I spent a lot of late nights doing live testing runs on trains that were empty other than a couple of people from our company and some MTA workers assigned to our test trains.
Enjoyed this, thank you for writing it up and posting
Thanks. I regret not taking more pictures during the initial testing indoors. I should document these things better, I only think about writing them up when it’s too late
I'd just do it with camera and some rudimentary image recognition, having bin present/absent (in process of being taken care of) signal should've been enough
Seems like a fun project but ultimately not worth it. Just setup a calendar alert to remind you to put the bins out and pull them back in, they're usually picked up on a schedule so it couldn't be too difficult to figure out when to go pull them back to the house.
We celebrate all useful and over-engineered hacks here!