Feb 13, 2016

A smart city is as good as the technology that keeps it smart. A smart city, however, can only keep itself clean by being smart about that. To make a smart city know exactly when and where it needs to take out the trash, means it needs to be able to communicate with it. So a system, where your local recycle bin needs to communicate with the city, has to be implemented. It is quite easy and at this workshop we showed how to build this system.

Consisting of a Microcontroller, like the Intel Galileo, this forms the go between for the sensors that detect the level of trash in a garbage bin. This, in turn, speaks to a server, that updates the status of how much it filled up. The status update could be visual, using some form of graphical interface, or even just a text based update. Once this is achieved, the data collected could be used by municipal services to structure collection in a more efficient manner, saving on multiple forms of resources, to improve productivity and reduce the carbon footprint from overuse of resources.