Hello!

It’s time for another Plastic Scanner update, a project where we build a device for identifying the most common types of plastic, making sorting and recycling simpler!

In May we did some work on the documentation infrastructure and the workflow around it, separating the staging and production versions of the site. Besides that, we made a small utility for interacting with the scanner and visualizing its output, called PSplot. It’s still early in development but it might be useful for you, despite some rough corners. Feel free to hack and help improve it – it’s all on our GitHub page!

There is a group of Industrial Design Engineering students from TU Delft and they are doing a great job of studying and improving the Plastic Scanner. Besides the use case studies, market research, and design possibilities, they designed a custom version of the plastic scanner (with a different form factor, ESP32 development board, and custom PCB). We’re excited to assemble it and see it in action!

Finally, we opened a Discord server dedicated to hackers, makers, and everyone interested in developing. We are looking for people in the following fields:

• optics (NIR spectroscopy, LEDs, photodiodes, etc.)
• electronics (PCB, component sourcing, circuit design)
• firmware (driver development, debugging, feedback on architecture and implementation)
• software (developing utilities for 1. visualizing and 2. analyzing the data. the First point is GUI python software development, PyQt framework. the second point is more data analysis, machine-learning oriented.)

While these are our focus points at the moment, all kinds of talents and enthusiasts are welcome! Join us in making the world more green and open source 🙂

Greetz, Jure