Are you looking for a fun IoT idea to tackle during the holidays? How about building yourself a smart trash can? More efficient waste disposal is an important benefit that the Internet of Things can offer to population centers, as it will keep cities cleaner while also helping them to cut costs, but you don’t need to be operating on an urban scale to realize some of the benefits for yourself as well.

This new Instructable walks you through how to build a smart trash can application using Temboo and an Arduino Yún. You’ll program the Arduino to send you alerts via Zendesk when the can is full, and to log data in a Google Calendar about when the trash is emptied. It’s also easy to mix and match hardware and web services if you want your IoT trash can to work differently–perhaps you want it to send you email alerts, or even Tweet when it’s full! Try it out, and make your trash smarter!