Home Assistant already knows which bins are due for collection. It can tell me it’s bin night, put the right colours on a dashboard, and send me a reminder. What it can’t tell me is whether I’ve actually done anything about it.
I had an idea a number of years ago to stick cheap Bluetooth tags on my wheelie bins and use an outdoor Bluetooth proxy to work out whether they were nearby. It was frustrating. The batteries drained quickly, the proximity readings wandered about, and the proxy was unreliable in that particular installation.
UWB was interesting because it measures the time taken by radio signals to travel between devices. That gives a distance measurement without having to guess it from signal strength. Over the last few weeks it’s become Bin Range: a fixed radio anchor, six little battery tags, and a Home Assistant setup that combines where the bins have been seen with when they’re due.
There’s a printed enclosure, custom firmware, and wireless updates as well. All of which is a fairly substantial answer to “have you put the bins out?”
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing