Pull Brain: designing a control room for garbage-sorting robots
Picture a recycling facility where robots photograph every piece of garbage they pick up, an AI decides what each item is and where it should go, and the leftovers get pressed into bricks that anchor a solar canopy. Now picture the humans working inside it. What do they look at all day?
That was my night at the Founders Inc hackathon. My teammate Arin Crumley — of Pull to Refresh, hence our name, Pull Brain — builds the robotics side: a "Photo Brain" that takes the pictures, classifies what it sees, and decides shred vs. press. It was our first time working together, and the split was clean. He gave the facility eyes and a brain. I gave the crew a way to live with it.
Signals are not information
Arin's API is honest machine output: batch numbers, composition labels, confidence scores, routing steps. Useful — and unreadable at a glance. The dashboard's whole job was translation: for every item, the crew should instantly know what it is, where it needs to go, and what should happen to it next.
So the facility view leads with outcomes, not telemetry. Electricity saved (the brain skips the shredder when pressing alone will do — that's real kWh). Bricks made today. Ballast assemblies — the headline count, because that's what holds up the solar canopy. Under that, three live station feeds: waste coming in, the recovery-sorting camera (my favorite frame of the demo is a pizza slice classified at 95%), and the shredder line. A little BRAIN> ticker narrates decisions along the bottom like a stock tape.
And yes — it's wired to Arin's real API, polling every five seconds. Real photos, real classifications, real staff messages. The mock world underneath is just insurance for demo night.
The theme is the alarm
The dashboard runs on F13, my adaptive-UI engine, and this hack finally let me use it the way I'd always imagined. When the Photo Brain spots a battery on the belt — e-waste, fire risk, robots hold position — the interface doesn't just pop a banner. The entire theme ramps hot: calm green through amber into red, contrast-checked the whole way so nothing ever becomes unreadable. Clear the alert and the room exhales back to green over a few seconds.
Ambient state you can feel from across the floor, faster than reading a single word.
The pager
The crew doesn't stand at the dashboard — so instructions also route to a pager view you pull up on a phone. I went fully 8-bit with it: pixel fonts, scanlines, and a screen that swaps phosphor like old handhelds. Virtual Boy red when you're needed, amber while you're responding, Game Boy green when it's clear. Silly on purpose, and weirdly the most-loved thing I demoed.
Ending the shift like a human
The third view is a letter, not a chart. "End of shift — a note for the crew": in the past 8 hours, this many kilograms became this many bricks — ballast for this many solar panels. At this pace, a house foundation every few weeks. When your work is routing garbage, someone should tell you it added up to something.
What I'm keeping
Robots don't need dashboards; people do. The interesting design work wasn't visualizing the AI — it was deciding what the AI owes the humans around it: a verdict, a destination, a next step, and an honest read of the room. Thank you Founders Inc for hosting — and Arin, let's do it again.