A minimal kiosk web app for Blacktown Council (NSW) residents. Shows which bins to put out on Monday evenings and counts down to the next Tuesday pickup — running on a Raspberry Pi with a small HDMI display mounted near the front door or garage.
- Put-out reminder that pulses. On the night before collection, from 5:00 PM to midnight, the bins you need to leave out gently pulse and glow so you don't forget (or put the wrong ones out).
- No more restarts. v1 froze a single "next collection" date at load, which went stale after each Tuesday pickup and needed a Pi reboot to fix. v2 derives the schedule live every second from the current time, so it rolls to the next cycle on its own and can never freeze on a past date.
- On-device fortnightly calculation is now the source of truth. Blacktown does not publish a public bin-day API (see below), so the app computes the Red/Green/Yellow cycle locally from your collection day plus a known Yellow bin date. No network needed once configured.
- Cleaner kiosk. The mouse cursor and scrollbars are hidden from inside the app, plus
--hide-scrollbarson Chromium and updated cursor-hiding steps for both X11 and Wayland (Bookworm).
- The app stores two things: your collection day (e.g. Tuesday) and a recent date the Yellow bin was collected. From those it computes the fortnightly cycle entirely on-device.
- Night before collection: shows the exact bins to leave on the kerb, pulsing from 5 PM.
- Collection morning: shows a "Collection day" message until early afternoon.
- After ~2 PM on collection day: automatically advances to next week's cycle.
- An optional Flask proxy (
proxy.py) can cross-check against a council API if one ever becomes available — but it is never required.
Blacktown City Council's Bin collection days page uses a client-side address widget and does not expose a documented public JSON API. The endpoint the v1 proxy pointed at (/api/v1/myblacktown/waste-services) is not a real council endpoint and returns nothing — which is why v1 was silently running on its local fallback all along. v2 makes that local calculation the intended, reliable source. If you ever confirm a real endpoint, set COUNCIL_API in proxy.py and the app will pick it up automatically.
Council-published fallbacks if you want to sanity-check your cycle: the printable Area 1 / Area 2 2026 recycling calendars (PDF) linked on the council page.
| Item | Source | ~Cost AUD |
|---|---|---|
| Raspberry Pi Zero 2W | Core Electronics / Little Bird | $29 |
| MicroSD card 16GB+ | Amazon AU | $8 |
| 7" HDMI display (800×480) | AliExpress | $35 |
| Mini HDMI adapter | AliExpress | $2 |
| Micro-USB power cable | AliExpress | $2 |
| Total | ~$76 |
Already have a spare tablet or monitor? Just point a browser at the Pi's IP — you only need the Pi + SD card (~$37).
blacktown-bin-day/
├── src/
│ └── index.html # Single-file frontend app (all logic lives here)
├── proxy.py # Optional Flask CORS proxy (not required)
├── start.sh # Launches proxy + static server + Chromium kiosk
├── binday.service # systemd unit for autostart on Pi boot
├── docs/
│ ├── INSTALL.md # Pi setup + kiosk hardening
│ └── DEPLOY.md # Pushing updates to the Pi (GitHub / VS Code / PuTTY)
├── CHANGELOG.md
└── README.md
python3 -m http.server 8080 --directory src/
# open http://localhost:8080, enter collection day + a recent Yellow bin dateSee docs/INSTALL.md for first-time setup and docs/DEPLOY.md for pushing updates (GitHub, VS Code local, or PuTTY/SSH).
MIT