BINITOR
Smart garbage monitoring system
Our Project
Unmanaged solid wastes are a serious problem with severe environmental and public health impacts. It causes soil, waiter, and air pollution and produces overloaded garbage sites which pose serious health risk to people. Cities and municipalities, especially in developing countries, are having difficulty to address this problem because of inefficient waste collection and disposal services.
As a possible solution to this problem, an Internet-of-Things (IoT) system called Binitor was implemented to monitor and track in real-time the status of garbage bins by measuring three parameters:
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Garbage Level - measured to know if the bin is already filled
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Orientation - Detected to identify if the bin is in straight or tilted position. Tilted beams have uneven distribution of the garbage inside so it may affect the level or depth measurement
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Temperature - Sensed to know if the bin is on fire due to hazardous wastes
Afterwards, the system will send all the data to an IoT platform. The platform will store, analyze, and visualize the data to authorized persons such as the garbage collectors.
Hardware Components
KY-020 Tilt Switch
A mercury switch is an electrical switch that opens and closes a circuit when a small amount of the liquid metal mercury connects metal electrodes to close the circuit. KY-020 is a one state mercury tilt switch which gives a digital output when tilted to one direction with respect to the horizontal and other state when tilted to the other direction.
Temperature Sensor
DHT11 is a low cost temperature and humidity sensor. It has a capacitive humidity sensor and thermistor. It can measure 0-500 C with +/- 2 accuracy. It measures temperature with a NTC thermistor.
Circuit Design
ESP8266
ESP8266 is a low cost wifi module popular for its usage in IoT. This module supports 802.11 b/g/n protocol to connect with the internet and can be easily programmed with Arduino IDE. It has onboard processing and storage capability and can be easily integrated with sensors and other devices. The board used in this project is a NodeMCU firmware based ESP8266 which follows standard GPIO pin format.
Ultrasonic Sensor
SR04 is a 4 pin ultrasonic module used to measure the distance of an object from a reference point. It has two transducers namely trigger pin and echo pin. The trigger pin sends a high frequency signal of 40Khz to the object ahead and the reflected signal is received by the echo pin. The distance between the two signal is measured by calculating the time difference between them using the following formula
Distance Travelled= Speed of the sound x Time
Software Design
ESP8266 sends sensor data to the IBM IoT platform via the MQTT protocol. The platform stores the data to a cloud database and gives it to the Node-RED application for real-time visualization
IoT Platform
Real-Time Monitoring
Node-Red
Real-Time Monitoring Flow
Node-RED Tutorials
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The web application user interface was created using Node-RED. To have a better understanding of how the different flows work, here are some useful sites:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AR432bguOY&list=PLKYvTRORAnx6a9tETvF95o35mykuysuOw
Arduino Code
The Arduino code can be downloaded or cloned from https://github.com/domEnriquez/Binitor.
The repository contains a breif description of what the program does.
Limitations
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Our system can only work best on garbage bins that have a fixed and flat top. Deploying our system to bins with movable top can cause sensors to give false data.
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No temporary local data storage mechanism so data would be lost if internet connection is unreliable
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Current hardware components are vulnerable to any debris in trash bin
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Tilt sensor can only detect orientation in one tilt direction
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Deploying system to multiple bins is costly since each bin requires one ESP8266 and all the sensors
Possible Improvements
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More efficient system and network infrastructure to deploy the system to multiple bins
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Implement seasonal time-series forecasting of garbage level data to give the garbage collectors
accurate information about trends of garbage disposals -
Place the system in a fireproof and waterproof packaging container
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Use more accurate orientation sensor that can detect the tilt angles of the trash bins
Energy Efficiency Analysis
To conserve energy, the system gathers and transmits data based on the garbage level:
Table I: Garbage-Based Level Reporting Interval
This decreases the duty cycle of the radio and sensor components of the system and consequently, lessens the overall energy consumption.
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To illustrate this, shown below is the radio energy cost of the system with and without the Garbage-Based Level reporting interval implementation.
Table II: ESP8266 Radio Component Power Consumption
Source Adapted from ESP8266 Datasheet
Assumptions:
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Garbage Level is less than 50% - 30 min interval
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Transmission and reception time of a packet is 5 ms
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Garbage-Based Level Interval
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Duty Cycle Computations:
2. Without Garbage-Based Level Interval
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Using the same procedure, the duty cycles and energy cost are:
Based from the results, 0.52 mA are saved in radio energy through the Garbage-Level Based Interval
Usage Instructions
Deployment
The system should be placed at the top of the trash bin. The placement location should be fixed and steady to avoid any erroneous data.
Monitoring and Control
Once the system is powered up, real-time garbage-level, orientation, and temperature of the bin can be detected and seen at the web application. The application also provides historical chart for retrospective analysis of the previous data. Moreover, it gives the user the capability to control the reporting interval of the hardware components.
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Alerts
Once data reached critical values like a full garbage level and unusually high temperatures, the web application would send a warning e-mail to the authorized individual.
Demonstration Video
Who We Are
Smart System Integration Cohorts
Gayane Avetisyan
Dominic Joseph RÂ Enriquez
