Simplifying My Bin Day Reminder System

So a while back, I cobbled together this script to check when our bins were being collected in Harlow. It worked fine - I never missed bin day - but good lord, it was overengineered for such a simple task. Looking back, I’m not sure what I was thinking with all those moving parts.

The original version was a real Rube Goldberg machine. It ran constantly in the background, waking up periodically to check for bin days. This meant I had to keep it running 24/7 on one of my servers, which was totally unnecessary when a simple scheduled job would’ve done the trick.

And the notification chain? Even worse. It published messages to MQTT, which then required NodeRed to be running to catch those messages, process them, and then forward everything to some SMS service that would finally text me. All that just to tell me “put the green bin out tonight!” Talk about using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

Discovering ntfy Made Everything Easier

The breakthrough came when I found ntfy.sh - this stupidly simple push notification service that lets you send alerts with just a basic HTTP request. No fancy authentication, no complex setup - just POST to a URL and boom, notification on my phone.

Look how clean this is compared to my old MQTT/NodeRed monstrosity:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

requests.post(
    f"https://ntfy.sh/{self.topic}",
    data=message.encode(encoding="utf-8"),
    headers={
        "Title": "Binday Today",
        "Priority": "3",
        "Tags": "rotating_light"
    }
)

Three lines, and I’m done. No more config files, no more message brokers, no more NodeRed flows. Just straight from code to phone.

Bindicator 2.0: So Much Simpler It’s Almost Boring

With the notification piece sorted, I stripped the whole thing down to the bare essentials. The new version just needs two things: my property’s UPRN (that weird ID number the council uses) and an ntfy topic to push messages to.

Best of all, I kicked it off my server entirely and moved it to a GitHub Action that runs once a day. The workflow just uses two secrets for the command-line args, and GitHub handles all the scheduling. One less thing for me to maintain!

What’s Next?

The new setup has been humming along nicely for a while now - I get my bin day reminders on time, with zero maintenance on my part. But of course, I can’t leave well enough alone.

I’m thinking of adding a day-before reminder to the mix. Nothing fancy, just a heads-up the day before bin day. Would be super helpful when we’re away and need to ask the cat sitter to wheel the bins out. As usual, everything’s up on GitHub if you’re curious or want to use it yourself.