our project for the Womxn Hacks 2.0 Hackathon, submitted in the categories hardware, education & sustainability awarded best runner up in the advanced category
Recycling is great for the planet, but is getting more and more confusing for people to decipher what is recyclable and what isn't. According to Santa Barbara County (see here), many new things have lost their ability to be recycled, such as plastic food containers (like yogurt), and paper food containers.
Recycle Right takes a picture of your preferred trash, such as a plastic water bottle, and uses machine learning to determine if it is recyclable or not! Simply hold your trash in the outlined area, press the green button, and wait until a green or red light indicates if it is recyclable or not.
We used a webcam, Raspberry Pi, and Arduino as our main sources of hardware for this project. Software-wise, we used TensorFlow, Arduino's IDE, and Python.
It was very time consuming to install, uninstall, and reinstall programs and systems into the Raspberry Pi. It was our first time using a Raspberry Pi so it was a steep learning curve, but was a great tool that we can't wait to use in the future.
Monica - I am proud of how much more experience I gained with Arduino and Raspberry Pi. Alysha - I started from the ground up, learning TenserFlow and exploring Machine Learning. Very proud to have installed pip (see meme in WH20's meme-challenge) Nina - Working with Raspberry Pi for the first time, and brainstorming with my team. We also learned more about Linux.
We learned so much about efficiency, operating systems, and machine learning.
This is a great technology that can be easily implemented into parks & open spaces, schools, and other places that many people (and recycles!) gather.