Smart trash bin under LoRa Wan

Abstract

Because of the uprising tendency of over-consumption of materials which are not recyclable, the quantity of public trash is growing continuously. An affordable and environmentally-friendly way to waste which is capable to perform real-time container state monitoring, gathering and delivery of garbage is still a significant issue to the Hong Kong. At present, according to the statistics of Hong Kong Environment Protection about the waste in Hong Kong, 68% of the MSW is disposed at landfills at a rate of 1.45kg/day per capita. An interview was conducted by Hong Kong Coconut in 2018, hikers complained litter problem in country parks getting worse. It reveals that the trash bins in a rural area in Hong Kong are having an unevenly allocated rate of rubbish usage which makes an efficient trash collection and monitoring become so difficult. The use of the smart trash bin under LoRa Wan can be a decent solution to this puzzle. LoRa Wan stands for Long Range Wan, which is a newly raised protocol that capable to transmit in long-range but low power consumption. It thus displays the optative potential as the network protocol to monitor the fill-level of a garbage bin in a distant region. It is evident to see that excellent trash administration can be improved if we can have the entire image of the bins' filling rate using the product from this project. This project intends to improve the efficiency of gathering trash from its bin in a faraway area, let's say the country park; by putting different types of sensors like ultrasonic and GPS sensors with Arduino devices based on LoRa network. In this project, a prototype design includes both hardware design and software interface were made based on the standard LoRa Wan specification. By having a glance on the graphical interface for the trash utilization rate of instant or past usage, the operation cost of trash collecting company can be saved. Moreover, the system can perform a useful function like fire alert, GPS tracking, and email alert system. In short, the whole LoRa Wan based smart bin serves as a plug and play IoT system that visualizes the real-time sensors’ data in a concise but reliable way.