No abstract

Nowadays the major difficulty faced by many countries is to monitor the recycling process. And there is an always emergent demand for low cost, very low power and condensed size monitoring systems with wireless communication systems, which can be used in different kinds of industrial environment applications. Consequently, the number of recycling spots has been steadily increasing. In order to ensure that the recycle bins, several monitoring solutions have been proposed. Still we have several limitations, such as requiring wires for power and/or communications and not being able to fit in all existing types of bins. This paper presents a wireless embedded solution for monitoring the level of the bins located in recycling spots. The proposed system automatically alerts a remote central station when a bin reaches a programmable filling level, thus avoiding the need to spot check if the bin is full and ensuring that the recycling spot is kept clean. The developed prototype required hardware-software co-design and aimed to meet the above mentioned requirements, resorting to the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol for wireless communications between all nodes in the network, each based on a System-On-Chip (SoC) CC2530 from Texas Instruments. Due to its wireless nature, the architecture requires a battery for power supplying the nodes. In recycling spot filling level readings of each bin is made up of ultrasonic sensor. The data collected by the monitoring platform is then sent to the remote central station that processes it in order to optimize routes and establish a scheduled collection of the recycling spots.