One request - after you toss in the garbage and the lid closes, make it "chew" for a couple seconds by rapidly opening/closing the lid over a small distance!
Oh boy that's not a good idea. I have a trash bin that opens automatically just like the author's post. I really realy love it. But the lid doubles as a fan when it opens and closes so it fans out the ordors. You'd want that amount of fanning minimized.
This applies mostly to food waste, and in home environments it's better to compost it than throw in a bin and send it to landfills. It takes some effort, but when it's done well, composting shouldn't cause a stink. A self-opening compost bin wouldn't be disgusting.
That makes assumptions that you have an outdoor space / back yard available for a compost bin and a practical use for said compost, and that's becoming a rarity for a lot of people.
I mean I was finally able to afford a two bedroom house with a modest back yard after nearly ten years living in student housing (the last one of which was more expensive than affordable rental housing, but there's a 10-15 year waiting list for that) so I could probably go for it (don't really have the space or the need for compost though).
> That makes assumptions that you have an outdoor space / back yard available for a compost bin and a practical use for said compost...
It made assumptions on using the compost (or disposing it), but no assumptions were made on backyards or outdoor spaces because those are not required for home composting. It can be done with just a little bit more space than what just one or two bins need, and especially with vertical stacking systems, this isn’t as big a problem.
Searching online for “How to compost at home” shows several such stacked systems that need minimal space.
What would you do with compost if you didn't have an outdoor space or back yard?
I used to use mine in the garden, but these days I've a municipal waste service come and take my compostables away. Kind of felt at first like I was giving away my sweet valuable compost for free, but then I found out they give out free mulch in return so was happy enough with that, as was my wife :-)
You've undoubtedly thought more about bin design than I ever have, or probably ever will, do you have any suggestion for combating that fanning effect?
My kitchen bin is of the slide-out cupboard type, and also suffers from that, despite being more of a shearing than a wafting action!
Treating this as an X/Y problem ... do you separate your waste? I separate anything that smells (non-compostable food waste, non-recyclable junk) into a separate pail, that is emptied every day or two, so it's never there long enough to get smelly. The dry recyclable stuff can stay in there as long as it wants, and the compostible stuff (waste vege material) never really smells too bad, but again gets tossed more frequently.
Compost, and then recycling (paper/tins/glass mixed where I am) and rubbish in two bins in the same drawer thing.
That's part of the problem really - after compost and recycling I'm left with very little waste, so anything that there is can sit there a while. I tend to empty it because it's been there a while rather than because it's full.
Hmm, you could install a small fan that kicks on when the drawer is open/closed to pull air from the interior and exhaust it into an adjacent airspace, maybe through a filter if that adjacent airspace is still the room you are in.
Make a lid that goes over the top of the trash so it's contained when pulled out. Manually removing the lid (or however you modify it) will be less dramatic than opening the drawer.
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When is the deadline for the next YC batch again? ><
(This is a joke and the names are made up if that's not clear from reading)
Hah, my parents have a commercial version of this. I hope his works better than theirs, because their's is always opening and closing at the wrong times!
ivanilves, thank you for writing this up and sharing the code & the video of the end result, it is a fun project!
As a thought experiment I've had a play to see what the state machine logic might look like if we try to replace the bool state variables with a set of explicit finite states, and to push the state transition logic into a pure function. Results are here: https://gist.github.com/fcostin/851c1b4d1e3cb75ba972408151f1...
It is more verbose, but one advantage of structuring it like this (that i've only partially succeeded at) is that state transitions only happen at most once per each call to advance_state. Might make it easier to read through and follow the logic. It also makes the state transition logic easy to unit test, since it is pure-functional instead of being mixed together with sensing and doing actions (unsure how much of a concern or possibility unit testing is with ino files, I've never done any arduino dev myself).
Not sure if this is anything like what SomeoneFromCA was thinking.
Thanks for your code, looks like this can help improving my state machine indeed. I'll try to apply that approach when I get my next slice of free time ;)
Sure, no problems, will give you feedback later, but here is one recommendation: combine group of booleans frequently used together in conditions into a new separate boolean variable. Say, for example, bool isMoving = (isOpening or isClosing).
