Alan Thomas
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phyBOARD
EcoSort Edge: Waste Sorting Lid - PHYTEC phyBOARD
AT
October 01, 2026 by Alan Thomas
EcoSort Edge is a retrofit lid that turns any 47–58 cm trash can into an AI sorter for plastic, metal, and trash. A PHYTEC phyBOARD-RT1170 (NXP i.MX RT1170) runs an int8 vision model in 14 ms and drives the lid servos. Its sloped chute design uses 41.8% less height than seesaw bins, and it's ready 5 s after power-on.
Figure 3. Sort test, top view. A plastic bottle rests on the chute gate at the bottom of the sloped lid while the camera, mounted in the back wall, captures it for classification. The metal braces around the rim reinforce epoxied joints that came apart during earlier testing.
Figure 4. Assembling the lid. The sloped lid was too large for our printer bed, so we printed it in four PETG sections and joined them with two-part structural epoxy. We sanded each mating edge first, because our first unsanded joint failed almost immediately.
Figure 5. Full schematic (KiCad, Rev C). Power comes from a 10,000 mAh power bank for the phyBOARD-RT1170 and a fused 5 V accessory rail, plus a separate fused 6.6 V LiFe pack for the 30 kg lid servo, all on one common ground. A 74AHCT125 buffer lifts the 3.3 V servo and trigger signals to 5 V, and a resistor divider drops the HC-SR04 echo back to the pad's voltage. DMG1012T MOSFETs switch the white, red, and green LEDs from 1.8 V pins. The limit switch and reset button use the pins' internal pull-ups with RC debounce, and the Pcam 5C connects directly to the camera port.