Published September 10, 2019

Trash Talker Using Bolt IoT

Things around us are dumb but not us. We can make them smart even a dustbin.

BeginnerFull instructions provided1 hour3,047

Things used in this project

Hardware components

Arduino UNO

Bolt IoT Bolt WiFi Module

Ultrasonic Sensor - HC-SR04 (Generic)

Jumper wires (generic)

Software apps and online services

Arduino IDE

Bolt IoT Bolt Cloud

Twilio SMS Messaging API

Story

Now-a-days, the developed cities are facing many problems. One of the major problems is collection of garbage. Due to the increase in the population, garbage is increasing rapidly throughout the cities. Mainly the increase of the apartments in the cities lead to increase in the garbage. The increase in the garbage will lead to several viral diseases and infections. The municipal people does not know when these local bins fill.

So, what if we could create a smart bin which alerts us when the trash is full.

We are going use the Ultrasonic Sensor, Bolt Wi-Fi module and Arduino Uno to measure the trash level and send us an SMS alert.

Here, we are gonna use some online services like Twilio to send us an SMS alert to the phone. We also use Telegram to send message to the channel

Hardware

UltrasonicSensor:

An Ultrasonic sensor is a device that can measure the distance to an object by using sound waves. It measures distance by sending out a sound wave at a specific frequency and listening for that sound wave to bounce back. By recording the elapsed time between the sound wave being generated and the sound wave bouncing back, it is possible to calculate the distance between the sonar sensor and the object.

To know further about the Ultrasonic sensor and how to interface it with the Arduino check the below link:

https://howtomechatronics.com/tutorials/arduino/ultrasonic-sensor-hc-sr04/

BoltIoTPlatform:

Bolt is an IoT platform which let you control your devices and sensors through the internet with ease. With firmware built into it, you can connect the bolt device to any wi-fi near you with the bolt app. With bolt you can control your device and monitor from any part of the world.

Bolt Device

TwilioMessagingAPI:

Twilio is a cloud communications platform as a service company based in San Francisco, California. Twilio allows software developers programmatically to make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages, and perform other communication functions using its web service APIs. It that enables powerful communication between mobile devices, applications, services, and systems throughout the business in order to bridge the gap between conventional communication.Twilio seeks to rid businesses of the messy telecom hardware by providing a telephony infrastructure web service via a globally available cloud API, allowing web developers to use standard web languages to integrate phone calls, text messages and IP voice communications into their web, mobile and traditional phone applications.

Telegram:

In Telegram, there is a third party applications called Bots. These run inside telegram lets users can interact with bots by sending them messages, commands and requests.

First create a channel and make it to public channel.
Then search for Botfather and type /start.
After typing that /newbot lets you create your own bot.
Make sure to create a bot with unique username and Bot name.
Note down the BOT Token.
Then add the bot to the channel you have created.

For more information check the below link:

https://pypi.org/project/telegram-send/

Hardware Setup

The Ultrasonic sensor is kept on the top of the dustbin to constantly check the level of the trash. The Arduino sends this trash level constantly to the Bolt device and the python code written for the Bolt device checks whether the level is less than the given limit in the code. If it is less than the given limit, it send an SMS alert and telegram message to the mobile phone.

Circuit for Trash Talker

Software:

Interfacing the ultrasonic sensor as mentioned in the above link in the blog would be quite mathematical. So, we could the ultrasonic sensor library by Erick Simoes which abstracts all the mathematical formulas of the sensor.

Here is the link for the library:

https://github.com/ErickSimoes/Ultrasonic

The Arduino is programmed to check the distance of the garbage and send the distance constantly to the bolt device constantly. The python code written for the bolt device will check whether the distance less than the required. If it is less than the required then it sends an alert through Twilio and Telegram.

SMS alert through Twilio

Telegram Message

Code

from boltiot import Bolt, Sms #Import Sms and Bolt class from boltiot library  
import json, time,requests
SID="The SID in the Twilio account"
AUTH_TOKEN="Auth_token from twilio account"
TO_NUMBER="Phone number to which you want to send the message"
FROM_NUMBER="Number provided by Twilio"
Channel_ID="Telegram ChannelID"
Tele_BotID="Bot API key"
SMS=Sms(SID,AUTH_TOKEN,TO_NUMBER,FROM_NUMBER)                          
def Twilio_message(message):
        try:
                print('Sending message through twilio')
                response=SMS.send_sms(message)
                print('The status of twilio messsage is:',str(response.status))
        except Exception as e:
                print("Error occured in Twilio message",e)
                print(e)
                return False
def Tele_message(message):
        url='https://api.telegram.org/'+Tele_BotID+ '/sendMessage'
        data={'chat_id':Channel_ID,'text':message}
        try:
                response=requests.request("GET",url,params=data)
                print('This is the Telegram response')
                print(response.text)
                telegram_data=json.loads(response.text)
                return telegram_data["ok"]
        except Exception as e:
                print("Error occured in sending message via Telegram")
                print(e)
                return False
Bolt_ID="your bolt id"
API_Key='bolt api key"
garbage_full_limit = 7 # the distance between device and  garbage in dustbin
mybolt = Bolt(API_Key,Bolt_ID)#This is to access the bolt device and send commands
response = mybolt.serialRead('10')#fetch data from arduino
message="Hello Brother, the trash can is full"
while True:
        response = mybolt.serialRead('10')  #Fetching the value from Arduino 
        data = json.loads(response)
        garbage_limit = data['value'].rstrip()
        print("Garbage level is", garbage_limit)
        if int(garbage_limit)<garbage_full_limit:
                Twilio_message(message)
                Tele_message(message)
        time.sleep(10)