Here’s our progress in week 9!
DAY 1
Monday, 8/7/24
Instead of the infrared distance sensors, we tried out the beambreak sensors, which consist of an IR emitter and an IR receiver as seen below.
When an object interrupts the IR beam between the emitter and receiver, the sensor detects this interruption, providing a binary signal of whether the beam is broken (an object is present and therefore the bin is full) or not (no object present and therefore bin is not full). However, we faced the same problem as with the IR distance sensors that we tried last week — they could not detect transparent materials which had broken the beam. This further bolstered us to use ultrasonic waves over infrared ones for bin fullness detection as we felt that transparent materials are definitely more prevalent in bins than soundproof ones (think of all the clear plastic packaging and bottles we throw away), hence ultrasonic sensors would be able to detect bin fullness more accurately than infrared ones.
We also put together the frame for the outer bin using metal pieces!
DAY 2
Tuesday, 9/7/24
We were discussing about the design for the opening of the bin. Our main concern was that the opening should be able to prevent users from throwing away long thin objects as such objects could give a false idea that the bin is full when it is actually not. We did consider using a sphere-shaped opening made out of 2 hemispheres.
After discussing, we decided to stick with the initial idea of having a bin opening similar to the Big Belly’s bin opening as this hemisphere design would be more tedious to make and attach to the bin itself.
Another progress we made was successfully activating the Raspberry Pi camera to take a picture. This camera will be placed in the bin to take pictures for cleaners to see to confirm the fullness of the bin.
Now the next step would be to ensure that photos taken would be uploaded into some sort of drive where it can be accessible by the cleaners.