My trash day reminder is one of my favorite automations.Using an integration that pulls the information from an official website, Home Assistant always knows which trash collection is due.Even using spoken reminders, however, we still sometimes forget to put the trash out on the right day, so I decided to build something that would be harder to ignore.
Missing trash day is a real pain Recycling gets filled up fast In a world that revolves around Amazon deliveries, you can soon amass a lot of cardboard boxes and other recyclable materials.For some reason, Amazon likes to send you a tiny USB stick in a box the size of a small fridge, with a ton of brown paper to stop the product rattling around too much inside the ridiculously oversized box.This means that we end up with a lot of recycling.
It's only collected once per fortnight, alternating with a standard trash collection.It means the recycling bin is almost always full to the brim by the time the collection is due.If we forget to put the recycling out, this is a real issue.
The bin is full, and the next collection isn't for two more weeks.We quickly become snowed under with empty boxes.I wanted to ensure that we never missed another collection.
Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32C3 Brand Seeed Studio The Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32-C3 is the perfect budget-friendly microcontroller for smart home projects.With Wi-Fi and Bluetooth built-in, it also features a super deep sleep mode for low power usage when it isn't doing anything.The compact size makes this ideal for building smart home projects, and ESPHome allows it to easily integrate into Home Assistant.
$5 at Seeed Studio $10 at Amazon Expand Collapse I wanted a reminder that would be very hard to miss Notifications and announcements aren't always ideal I already have notifications set up to remind us when a trash collection is due.The smart speaker tells us which collection is due the morning of the day that it needs to be put out, and notifications get sent to our phones to remind us in the evening.Usually, this is enough, but sometimes circumstances conspire against us.
If we go out, we might turn off notifications, or we might simply miss them if our phones have run out of charge or for some other reason.I wanted to set up a dedicated physical trash reminder that would have one specific job: to ensure that we couldn't forget to put the trash out.It needed to be something that we couldn't ignore or fail to spot.
Related My internet went down for hours before I noticed—so I built an internet status light with an ESP32 I know when my internet is on the blink.Posts 1 By Adam Davidson An ESP32 seemed like a simple solution Using a smart bulb wasn't going to cut it I'd considered using a smart bulb in the bedroom as the trash day reminder.If the light in the bedroom was flashing red non-stop, we weren't going to be able to miss it.
The problem was that I still don't have smart switches in the bedroom, so there was a chance that the light switch in the bedroom would be turned off and the smart bulb wouldn't have any power to be able to flash red.When in doubt, try an ESP32.This has become my mantra more and more, because there's so much you can do with these tiny and inexpensive boards.
I already had an ESP32 in the bedroom acting as a Bluetooth proxy.Using the Bermuda integration, I can ask Home Assistant's voice assistant where I left my phone or my Apple Watch, and it will be able to tell me with reasonable accuracy which room each device is in.Since my ESP32 has an LED on board, I figured that it should be fairly simple to get the LED to flash incessantly until I toggled a helper in Home Assistant that confirms that I’ve put out the trash.
In theory, I should be able to add this functionality while still keeping the ESP32 working as a Bluetooth proxy.It turned out to be incredibly simple to do.Since the ESP32 was already set up in ESPHome, I could wirelessly edit the configuration to add in code that checks the state of the trash_out helper.
When the Thursday-evening reminder is active, the LED stays off if the helper is on and blinks if the helper is off, and the ESP32 still works as a Bluetooth proxy.The blinking blue light is impossible to miss at night It won't stop until I confirm that the trash is out Close The blue flashing LED is noticeable during daylight, but really obvious once you turn out the lights at night.It's not something we're ever likely to miss.
One small annoyance was that there's also a red LED on the ESP32 board that's used to indicate power.On my ESP32 board, there doesn't seem to be a way to turn off this LED via configuration, so in the end I opted for a typical engineer's solution, and just covered the LED with sticky tack.Now, every Thursday evening, an automation resets the trash_out helper, and the blue LED flashes annoyingly until I toggle it back on.
Once I've turned on the helper, the LED turns off, and we can get to sleep without any blinking lights.The physical trash day reminder works remarkably well I wasn't sure if flashing a tiny LED would be enough to get our attention, but it's very noticeable in the dark.The next phase is to use Frigate to examine the feed from my video doorbell and determine whether the trash has been put out, so that the entire process becomes fully automatic.
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