While recyclable carbide pickups are convenient, you need to keep track of what kind of waste is picked up: Miss the bi-weekly paper pickup and you’ll soon be able to stock up on four-week value boxes and newspapers. When [Dominic Buchstaller]As the pile of cardboard begins to reach his ceiling, he decides to take action by making his own bin: a fridge magnet that helps you remember when to take out a bin.
A simple but effective BinPal is an ESP32 board that connects to Google Apps scripts and retrieves pickup schedules from Google Calendar. When one of the four categories of waste is scheduled for pickup, its icon is highlighted on an LCD screen. The user can confirm that the bin has been brought for pickup by pressing a touch-sensitive button; If this is not done by 8pm, the display’s backlight starts flashing as an additional reminder.
The outer shell of the device is made of laser-cut plywood, with a few strong magnet glue inside to ensure that the bin is firmly attached to the refrigerator. In the true spirit of recycling, [Dominic] His parts are made using the ingredients in the bin to make the binpal. However, these parts are all readily available online, and the design should be easy to adapt to a variety of hardware platforms, including the complete schematics and code available on the project’s Hackaday.io page.
[Dominic]Its design was inspired by a flashing LED work reminder that we featured a few years ago. You can also create a family task reminder by reusing it to display a Kindle’s ePaper.