I've had two bins fitted with a Bin Monitored for 10 days or so, one is fitted to my blue (recycling) bin, and another on my black (general rubbish) bin.

Unfortunately with the blue bin monitor I believe I broke the accelerometer whilst debugging my code, or maybe it was one from the duff AliExpress batch and never really worked well. Either way it doesn't appear fully functional and often "latches" in a certain orientation.

The Black bin unit has been running in high power mode, sending data via WiFi ever minute, so the battery has been going flat regularly, and annoyingly I fitted the battery monitor resistors the wrong way around so it always reports a full battery!.

I've not as yet deployed a unit to my green bin, this is still on my desk for firmware development.

Dashboard:

I created a little dashboard in Tinamous so I could see how full my bins were. I'm sure you'll appreciate the blue line used for the black bin, and black line used to indicate the blue bin, this is some unfortunate default colours applied to the chart which plots the primary field (PercentageFull) for any device tagged "BinMonitored".

Bin Opened Notifications

The screen shot below shows the Tinamous timeline for the black bin monitor which posts notifications when it detects the lid is opened or it thinks the bin has fallen over (in this case, it is me removing the unit to replace the battery). Tinamous can be configured to send a text message, email or other notification when a status post is published containing certain text, so we can use "Lid has been opened" to trigger the sending of a text message to myself so I know a parcel may have been left for me.

Rubbish Level Tracking

The rubbish level sensor has work well, unfortunately the chart is not so interesting, as you can see a week ago my blue bin was full!

I was a little unsure how the rubbish level in the black bin would register as I use black bags for my rubbish in that bin, however the IR sensor appears to work well with that, the chart below shows when I added some more rubbish to my black bin...

Environmental Monitoring

I didn't fit a BME680 to the black bin unit as I wanted to asses the impact on battery life without that sensor, however the blue bin sensor has been working well, I'm not sure it's any use for bin monitoring, but it does make a nice outside "weather" sensor.

I still have no idea if the VOC gas sensor will be any use for Bin Monitored, I've not yet deployed a unit into my green (compost) bin which might be a little more interesting. However Bin Monitored may be suited to a garage monitor system, attached to the door it could detect of the car is in the garage, if the garage door is up, and using the gas sensor, if their are any dangerous vapours in the atmosphere, for example if the car was leaking petrol, or if the engine was running with the doors closed. (I don't know how it would respond to CO, and I've got no intention of finding out!).

Overall I'm pleased with how well it is working, especially for a first version. Battery life is a problem, but I'm currently running both my units in a fairly high frequency wake and send pattern so it should improve.