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Professional engineer. Unprofessional tinkerer.

Hobby projects and experiments, built outside of work.

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Bin Night
20 January 2026

Is it bin night? Well now you know

This is actually the third iteration of the same concept - showing you whether or not it's currently bin night (and which bin to put out). The first had a flat stencil 'bin night', backlit by an appropriately coloured LED. The second had a screen and I'd programmed a wildly complex menu system to configure the time and bin days, which was cool because anyone else could use it - so I gave it away as a gift (but didn't take a photo!). This version however I'm quite proud of.

Features

  • E-ink screen, donated by a supermarket
  • Adapter Board E-Ink DESPI-C02 and a DIY PCB interface
  • ESP32 microcontroller
  • Council bin schedule scraper
  • Gist fetchable data
  • LiPo battery
  • Resin-printed case

Build

So, let's go from the bottom up. First I wrote a Node.js script that uses Cheerio to scrape from the council waste services' calendar and parse the hell out of it which needs running anually and pasting into a gist. Seems a silly way to host an API but it's so small, flat, unvolatile and unchanging that it does the job neatly.

The device connects to the WIFI, grabs the pool time and said data to figure out if it's a bin night and whatnot then draws its graphics to the screen. A huge part of the challenge was the extremely low power requirements but it works happily for weeks, deep sleeping as it does for 8 hours a time. Oh and it has a tidy resin-printed case with magnets to slap on my fridge!