Smart can

Inspiration

We were not inspired by a particular design but were inspired by the problem of the ongoing rat epidemic in New York caused by the huge amount of waste ridden across its streets.

What it does

Our product's first feature is a rotating auger that adjusts to the size of trash thrown in and turns to compact trash to store more trash in the bin. This prevents the issue of garbage cans in New York constantly overflowing and leaking onto the streets. We used stepper motors to power our auger and due to their lower torque output used a 2:1 reduction with custom designed v-helix gears. In order to turn the rotating auger mechanism we used a 2:1 reduction with stepper motors once gain but used bevel gears to optimally place the stepper motor to conserve space.

A sensor in the bin informs an application of its fill status allowing New york City to coordinate a garbage truck driver routes optimally to make sure that their carbon emissions are lower. Garbage trucks have an average mileage of 8 mpg and so this prevents excess emissions.

How we built it

We laser cut the entire body of our trash can, a square axle, and also the holder for the auger mechanism. We custom designed and 3d printed all of our gears, bearings, and one of our axles out of PLA. The only actuators we used were stepper motors.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a huge challenge with tolerances and dealt with this through continually sanding many of our components and still managed to make use of all of our pieces with minimal wastage. We also ran into the huge problem of lacking smooth bearings and dealt with this by creating custom 3d printed ones fitted for our non-circular axles. This made our rotation still smooth and let us use these differently shaped axles to drive the rotation of an object.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of maintaining rotational motion without the usage of steel axles, bronze bushings or, set pins. We combatted this problem by using plus or square sized axles that were laser cut or 3d print to turn any object fitted to the axle without the usage of a set screw or hub that clamped to it.