A man has built six bins, each tagged with a tiny radio, so his house can tell him whether he has put them out. The system is called BinRange, and it solves a problem Home Assistant already knew existed but could not answer. The source admits it is ridiculous, and the project is now complete.
Why Bins Needed Radio Tags
Home Assistant already knows which bins are due for collection. It can remind the owner, show the right colors on a dashboard, and mark the day. What it cannot tell is whether a bin has actually moved.
Most people set a reminder on their phone. Some simply remember. Neither approach requires a custom firmware build.
The maker had a different plan. He wanted to know whether a bin had moved. He mostly acquired another thing to fiddle with.
The Long Road From Bluetooth
The maker tried cheap Bluetooth tags years ago. The setup was frustrating. Batteries drained quickly. Proximity readings wandered. The proxy was unreliable. The signal strength method, RSSI, relies on too many variables — walls, parked cars, reflections, antenna orientation, battery voltage — to produce a reliable reading.
UWB changed that. Ultra-wideband radio measures the time taken by radio signals to travel between devices. It gives a distance measurement without guessing from signal strength. The maker was intrigued by AirTags and dug into how UWB worked. The bin idea came back.
Six Bins, Six Tags
The house has six bins: one general waste, one food compost, one garden waste, two recycling, and a glass bin. Not all are on the same collection schedule. The Waste Collection Schedule integration for Home Assistant scrapes the council’s schedules and keeps track of what is due.
The maker used Makerfabs ESP32-WROVER/DW3000 boards. He tested two powered over USB before tying them to Home Assistant. A local web view let him separate the boards and watch what happened without stretching a USB cable between them.
The antenna orientation mattered. At about ten metres, changing the boards from flat to upright took the observed success rate from 37% to 100%. A slower radio setting with a longer preamble also worked where the initial fast setting struggled.
“My mind was utterly blown.”
That was the moment of truth. Two little boards exchanged radio signals and agreed with a tape measure to within two centimeters.
The Walk Outside
The recorded test showed a measured gap of 10.1 metres producing an average reading of about 10.09 metres, with a standard deviation of three centimetres. That was encouraging for a project that only needed to recognize a bin leaving a storage area.
The outdoor walk was more revealing. Readings were reliable to roughly thirty metres, then intermittent further out. The furthest recorded reading was 37.28 metres, with gaps. A car could block the path completely.
The maker also spent time on an academic question about how many anchors would add more dimensions. He considered direction, location, and triangulation on a 2D plane. He concluded it was totally not worth it for this job.
Firmware, Enclosures, and Wireless Updates
BinRange includes a printed enclosure, custom firmware, and wireless updates. The maker leaned heavily on Codex throughout the build. Astra became available part-way through, and the maker was curious to see how it would do.
The system uses one anchor. The maker set a ten-metre boundary: inside is Home, beyond it is Out, when there is a fresh reading. That meant he could start with one powered board rather than turning the garden into a positioning test range.
The Ridiculous Truth
The maker admits he has ridiculously over-engineered this. He is so far from normal that six radio-equipped bins seemed like an enjoyable way to spend his evenings.
This is a solution to a problem that did not need solving. Home Assistant already knew which bins were due. The owner now knows whether they have moved.
The project is a fair warning to anyone who reads it. If you find yourself building a system to track your bins, stop. Put them out. The problem is solved.
The source’s own admission is the whole story. The bins are tagged. The system works. The owner is amused. The rest of us are left wondering why anyone thought this was a good idea.
It was a good idea. Just not the kind of good idea most people have.
Source material: “Surely you have ultra-wideband radios on your bins too?,” sjg.io.
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