I am trying to track if my rubbish bins have been put out for collection. I can issue alerts saying to put them out, but I would like to be able to tell if they have actually been put out.
As the bins are about 250 feet from the house when they are out, I was thinking of somehow tracking their presence to the house - or not. If not, then they are “out”
Is there anything that I could attach to the bin which will allow this?
Obviously it needs to be small, robust and cheap given the way bins are handled during collection and also as bins will go missing.
If the distance is high, a bluetooth low energy (BLE) tracker like a Tile could do the trick. Beware though newer Tile models may use tricks to hide themselves once connected to the app. I personally have no problems with them when they are removed from the Tile app but you might want to consider cheaper alternatives that do not employ these tricks. I placed a bluetooth proxy near the things marked with tiles, but you may want to avoid having them anywhere near where the bins are out.
You might also want to look at espresence, as it includes distance information that could be of use if the BLE tracker stays in range of bluetooth even when outside.
Point a camera to the bins where they are supposed to be if they’re not out and then use image recognition to detect every minute if the bins are there or not. You can then use that to create a sensor that is a binary sensor or a device tracker, using a template or something like that. You can have an automation run every minute or within the template sensor itself run the update routine every minute that will call the service to take a photo, recognize image and then maybe ask some LLM if the thing is there or not.
I would use frigate since it has detectors for each camera stream already built in (optional to be turned on). A bonus of using Frigate is that you can update the sensor as soon as somebody moves around the area. And that is nice, because that means you can get an idea of when exactly the bins were moved.
Unfortunately the bins are not in sight of my cameras as they are at the end of a track away from the house and its not possible to install any cameras at the end of the track (I don’t own the track)
Don’t forget that to use these as device trackers, you will have to have something like a Bluetooth proxy inside of your home. The good thing about using these sorts of devices as trackers is that the Bluetooth proxy can estimate, in the device tracker attributes, the distance, which is nice because it can tell you more information than just whether it can detect the bins or not.