Joey van der Bie

In the Dutch theme park de Efteling they have a talking trashcan for over 50 years now! To honour this, I made a ‘in house’ version for in my room. The Holle Bolle Gijs was also build to finish the Hardware & Physical computing course of the Media Technology program at the Leiden University.

The trashcan is made of paper mache, newspapers, some carton and acryl paint. For the electronics I used an Arduino2009 connected to a mp3 player. When the Arduino detects that movement in the mouth of the trashcan, it plays a sound from the mp3 player. When there is no detection of movement, the Arduino keeps on playing a sound to attract attention. The light detection is currently done with a LDR, but I’m planning to switch to infra-red detection, as is used in shops, escalators and elevators. The Arduino controls the mp3 player by using 2 electric relays. 1 for play and pause, and 1 to skip through the sounds. The mp3 player is set up to repeat play one sound.