My Problem: I live in the upper floor of an apartment building. There are over a dozen other residents living in the building. We share only few garbage cans – for general waste it's only one, for recycling a couple more. In the days before it's emptied, the cans are already overflowing and pretty much unusable.
Now, to reduce this problem I use the HACS Waste Collection Schedule for Home Assistant. It creates entries in my calendar, when my local waste collection company empties out our trash bins.
To further ease the "garbage logistics" in my home, I bought E-Paper-Displays with integrated ESP32's, called Paper S3 by M5Stack. Those modules have integrated batteries, WiFi and are magnetic on the back. They fit perfectly into my scenario.
So, I programmed dedicated sensors in my HomeAssistant, which display the remaining time, until a garbage can is emptied.
That functionality is nice and all, but I wanted to make a little more use out of my devices. Afterall the modules are not that cheap and have to update the remaining time regularly anyway. So, why not make them a little more interesting and pretty?
I let my boyfriend, being an illustrator, draw a few cute images for each can. Each can should have multiple images, so that over the day different content is shown. Also I want to have seasonal images, for Halloween or Christmas. At night, the illustrated animals on the labels could sleep, or they could do something fun in the summer.
My non-technical boyfriend can put images into a folder and the script can select a random one. For more customizability, the images get more meta-data in a json-file.