This developer put ultra-wideband radios on six wheelie bins to answer one question: have you actually put the bins out?
Surely you have ultra-wideband radios on your bins too?
Simon Green built BinRange, a Home Assistant setup that tracks whether his six wheelie bins have actually been moved for collection. After Bluetooth RSSI proved too unreliable, he switched to ultra-wideband radios: a fixed anchor and battery tags on each bin. The system measures distance with centimetre-level precision, uses an accelerometer to wake the tags only when a bin moves, and delivers signed firmware updates over Bluetooth. Green leaned heavily on AI tools like Codex throughout the build.
The first time I calibrated it with a tape measure and watched the reported distance differ from my measurement by less than two centimetres, my mind was utterly blown.