Important news about HackSpace

We have some important news to share about HackSpace: Issue 81 was the last issue of HackSpace as a standalone magazine, and HackSpace has become part of The MagPi, the official Raspberry Pi magazine. Starting with issue 145, We’ll be adding pages to The MagPi to make room for the stories and tutorials you’ve come to expect from HackSpace.

BinDayCator

By Andrew Gregory. Posted

After a few too many forgotten bin collections, Darren Tarbard decided to make a mini bin day indicator using colourful tech.

"I designed, using Blender, and 3D-printed a bin that I could fit the electronics unobtrusively within for a clean design. The electronics consist of an ESP8266 programmed via Arduino and some NeoPixels. I made a YouTube tutorial to show people how to make their own:

"We have four different coloured recycling bins that are collected based upon a collection schedule created by the council" so "the second part of the puzzle was creating a Node-RED flow which polls my local council website each day. The BinDayCator then uses this to automatically show the correct bin colour(s) and pulse when the bin needs to be put out. The tutorial for this part is here:

"When I tweeted about my creation, I was amazed to find it struck a chord with lots of people, getting nearly six thousand retweets, two million views, and reshared on Reddit and Facebook where it got thousands of comments."

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