We see a lot of clocks here at Hackaday. Some of them are better than others, but this one from [John Graham-Cumming] is definitely a rubbish clock. It performs the simple yet vital task of keeping track of which day is which when it comes to trash collection.
The big revelation for us from this project is that the standard plastic battery clock mechanism which you’ll no doubt be familiar with from many cheap clocks can also be bought with gearing for a weekly rather than daily revolution. The physical hack is therefore a pretty simple one of mounting the movement with a single hand over a face showing the waste collections, and the write-up goes into more depth about the code for creating custom SVG clock faces. We’re already thinking of interesting stuff that can be done with one of these movements.
Meanwhile, we like this clock, but it’s certainly not the first trash indicator we’ve seen.
We could use a 14 day clock to remind us of recycling pickup.
Yeah, around here a 7 day clock wouldn’t cut it. Organics are picked up weekly, trash and recycling on alternating weeks. Yard waste on the same day as trash, but only from mid-March to mid-December. Christmas trees on the same day as trash, but only in January. Pickup day changes to the next day if it falls on a holiday. You’d need a 366 day clock to cover all the possibilities (including leap years).
Yeah, likewise, we’ve got a two-weekly cycle for trash & recycling, with green waste more erratic.
And then the whole thing shifts by 1-2 days whenever there’s a bank holiday.
I’ve resorted to a web scraper sending a push notification to my phone.