⚙️Project Coordinator Intern at RecycleSmart

Pello is a smart waste sensor designed to optimize commercial garbage collection routes. Instead of trucks running fixed schedules and emptying bins that are barely full, Pello lets haulers only visit bins that actually need emptying — cutting unnecessary trips and meaningfully reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Working directly with the VP of Pello, I helped bring the device from concept to a live deployment across UBC's campus — up to 200 bins. It started with the fundamentals: testing different ultrasonic sensors to understand their behaviour at various distances and angles, and figuring out which ones were actually worth building around. From there I moved into physical prototyping — CADing cone geometries, building a plywood test enclosure by hand, and running a systematic test suite across sensor types, mount configurations, and cone profiles (wide, narrow, thin) to nail down the best combination for the first product iteration. I also helped assemble the electrical components for the camera module. The most memorable part was the UBC rollout itself. Installing across an entire university campus is a different beast than a lab — we ran into rainwater ingress from improperly sealed units, and bins with sloped backs that made flush mounting impossible. For the latter, we designed a custom wedge mount on the fly to maintain a consistent vertical placement angle. Shipping something and then debugging it in the real world taught me more than any amount of bench testing. Once everything was live, we could monitor the entire network through our IoT dashboard in real time — a satisfying moment after months of work going from a sensor on a bench to a city-scale deployment.