Smart Bins

Problem Statement: Given by Municipal Corporation of Pali District, Rajasthan, India. In a large city, it is not feasible for the garbage loaders to roam around the city every day and find the dustbins that are full and should be empty. And at the same time, if the dustbins are full and the loaders don’t came up on time to empty the dustbins, people will not find a place to throw their garbage. So, to optimize fuel consumption of heavy truck loaders and save their time and money and to make the garbage system more smart, we took this project and tried to find the solution with the minimum loopholes.

HERE is the glimpse of the beautiful journey :-

Final Product

SET, CAMERA, ACTION :-

CAM1 : Set on the transmitter that is collecting data of how much the dustbin.

CAM2: Set on the receiver that is wirelessly receiving the data of the transmitter and displaying it on the serial monitor.

The dustbin is kept unfilled in the beginning and the serial monitor is showing reading of how much the dustbin is filled. Once the dustbin is filled above the threshold, the indication is seen on the monitor that the dustbin is full.

Here is the link to the .dip file of the pcb design that I have made for my nodes.

WORKING:–

#NETWORK

A dedicated network was required that would be able to collect data from the bins situated at different distances from the coordinator.

• Basic Star Topology wouldn’t have worked in such a scenario because all the nodes were not in range with the coordinator.
• Mesh Topology was not preferred at that moment because the router nodes in that case couldn’t have gone to sleep at any point in time. This would have required a good power supply at the Tx4.
• I went on to find a solution which indeed was proven a fine one as I tested in on to the field.
• The nodes that were in range with the coordinator could were directly linked to the coordinator that is Tx5 and Tx6.
• Tx1, Tx2 and Tx3 were not just on the threshold of the range but also had obstacles in between the path from nodes to coordinator.
• A star network was built making Tx4, the star coordinator and sending the data of Tx1, Tx2 and Tx3.,# DATA FORMAT
• The challenge was to determine how much the dustbin is filled. Parameters could have been distance or weight. To keep the design simple and with the budget that we have in our hands, we chose distance as the measurement parameter.
• Ultrasound was used to throw on to the garbage which when reflects back in some time. This time is calculated by the micro controller. With leveraging code from a great tutorial here at howtomechatronics.com. I have managed to get the distance from the ultrasonic where the garbage is filled till now.
• Now, what should I send to the star coordinator. I decided to send a struct that contains the data as well as the node ID. This would help differentiating the data of different nodes.
• Now since, the star coordinator is getting data from 3 nodes and is itself transmitting its own data to the coordinator. For the star coordinator, hence, I have made a struct that would have data of all the different nodes in different types as well as a type that contains its own data. I have commented the code well. This can be well understood in the code itself.# Battery life and Sleep Mode
• Sleep Mode functionality was to be must included in the transmitters because the current consumption of the batteries was around 8mA during transmission.
• I used the sleep mode of ATmega 328p to reduce the current consumption.
• The next task was to use the watchdog timer to wake up the IC after a certain time. Codes for sleep mode is well commented.
• For 10 minutes the transmitter, remains sleep consuming 2.5 mA and for a second it transmits consuming 8mA and again goes back to sleep. The average current consumption was thus reduced to around 2.6 mA. Thus making a battery life of 2600 mAh battery of around one and half months. Further R&D on sleep mode is done in the next project. Here we have brought the 2600mAh batteries.

• # Packaging and Installing
• Packaging was indeed a challenging task as we were to package the device inside a box with Two Holes for Ultrasonic, a hole for Antenna, another one for inserting the USB cable to change the codes if needed.
• Further drills were done on top of the boxes when we were to attach the device with the Bins.
• The final Designs were as follows :-

This is our team named - 'Indees', i could have never thought of doing anything in my life if these people weren't there. In the black suit is my Guru M.V. Deepak Nair (https://bit.ly/2z6E7qF), the man who made an engineer out of an ordinary child. The two guys on the right are my best-friends at work, Ritam and Mradul who taught me to be sincere and have a work-ethic in life.