Surely you have ultra-wideband radios on your bins too?

A maker built a system to detect whether household wheelie bins have been put out by using ultra-wideband (UWB) ranging instead of unreliable Bluetooth RSSI. The setup, called BinRange, pairs a fixed UWB anchor with six small battery tags, custom firmware, a printed enclosure and Home Assistant integration. Early tests used two Makerfabs ESP32-WROVER/DW3000 boards to validate distance measurements; antenna orientation and slower radio settings greatly improved reliability. Calibrations showed sub-2 cm agreement with a tape measure in one case and an outdoor reliable range to roughly 30 m (occasional readings to 37 m), so a single anchor plus a 10 m threshold was sufficient to classify a bin as Home or Out. The anchor publishes readings over MQTT and Home Assistant discovers each tag; the radios continue ranging independent of the home server.

Commercial KKM K4W tags were re-flashed with custom firmware on nRF52833 + DW3110 hardware, using a LIS3DH accelerometer interrupt to keep the CPU and UWB radio asleep until motion wakes it. Stationary check-ins were set from 10 to 30 minutes, with 5-second reporting while moving. Firmware updates are delivered securely over Bluetooth from the anchor with rollback support. Measured costs were roughly US$124 for development boards and US$330 for ten sample tags plus programming jig. Battery life remains to be measured.