Teaching a Raspberry Pi to Take Out the Trash

I built a robot that sorts garbage. A PyTorch vision model running on a Raspberry Pi looks at whatever you drop in, decides trash or recycling, and a set of motors physically tips it into the right bin. There’s a little GUI so you can watch it think. The repo is called HighFive, because it deserves one.

Here’s what nobody tells you about these projects: training the model is the fun, solved part. You download data, you fine-tune, the accuracy number goes up, you feel like a genius. Then you bolt it to actual hardware and the physical world starts negotiating. Cameras don’t care about your validation set. Motors have opinions. The gap between “works in a notebook” and “works on a device that lives next to a garbage can” turned out to be the whole project.

Mechanical engineering major, software habits — this was the first build where both halves earned their keep.