BinPal Recycling Reminder

This friendly fridge-mounted waste indicator helps you remember what to put outside.

Jeremy Cook
3 years ago

Dominic Buchstaller is admittedly bad at remembering things, especially if they’re boring and/or repetitive. Keeping track of the recycling schedule definitely qualifies, and as such he needed a little bit of help to keep things on track. After a bit of research, he found an Andreas Spieß Google Calendar reminder box — which we featured here — but saw room for a few improvements.

His new BinPal device uses an ESP32 to get trash/recycling information from a Google Calendar, and is compact enough to reside nicely on your refrigerator as a magnet. It shows the schedule status via an HX1230 display, which is similar to the Nokia 5110 monochrome LCD. Two capacitive sensor inputs allow the user to select one of the waste icons to delete when done. If a task has not been completed by 8pm, the LCD's backlight starts to flash, drawing attention to the now-urgent item.

BinPal operates wirelessly, and is able to function on battery power for a few weeks between charges, thanks in a large part to putting the ESP32 to sleep most of the time. It also uses the ESP32’s ultra-low-power (ULP) coprocessor to take care of blinking the backlight, along with keeping track of the seconds during sleep mode. The device has a battery monitor screen that can be accessed by pressing both buttons at once, which will hopefully help keep the household on top of this new, if less frequent, repetitive task.

Jeremy Cook
Engineer, maker of random contraptions, love learning about tech. Write for various publications, including Hackster!
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