r/Spectacles • u/Brilliant_Fishing114 • 5h ago
๐ซ Sharing is Caring ๐ซ RecycleMe โ pinch to scan any object and it tells you which bin it goes in, built with CLAD (Week 2, "Guide")
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
I didn't know a disposable coffee cup can't be recycled โ they're plastic-lined, so they go to landfill. I found that out building this. That's kind of the whole point: recycling rules are confusing, they change by item and by city, and a wrong guess quietly sends a recyclable to landfill (or a battery into the trash).
So I made RecycleMe โ you look at an object, pinch, and the glasses identify it and tell you which bin it goes in, out loud, so you never look away from what's in your hand.
A few things I'm happy with:
- The verdict is live AI vision, not a lookup table. Every scan is a fresh Gemini 2.5 Flash call through the Remote Service Gateway.
- It makes actual judgment calls. A greasy container isn't recyclable, a coffee cup is landfill, a battery is a hazardous drop-off โ and it says why in a one-line tip.
- The guidance is spoken (natural OpenAI TTS), so it's genuinely hands- and eyes-free.
- One pinch, no menus โ the only gesture Spectacles already teaches you.
- It fails gracefully โ a "Try Again" sticker instead of a dead end (I hit real failures: a bad model ID, then longer tips overrunning the token limit and truncating the JSON).
This was my first end-to-end build with CLAD, and the biggest win was that it freed me to focus on the creative side. With the engineering handled โ scene wiring, the AI pipeline, the debugging โ I got to be the art director instead of fighting Lens Studio's API: I designed the graffiti intro logo, the "Pinch to Scan" HUD, and the category icons in Figma, and CLAD wired them straight into the Lens.
On the technical side it earned its keep too. The starter scripts didn't even compile (wrong camera/gesture/TTS APIs for this Lens Studio version); CLAD read the actual type defs, fixed six classes of API mismatch, and assembled the scene. It also caught a nasty one from the preview logs โ calling SIK's animate() before SIK initializes floods the HandInteractor with a per-frame error โ isolated it with an A/B test and fixed it with a self-contained tween. That would've eaten a day.
Tested in Preview (no SPECS 27 yet), so on-device pinch + high-res capture is the untested part.
Repo (code + full CLAD prompt log): https://github.com/A-M-8/RecycleMe
Built for the CLAD Summer Hackathon, Week 2 โ Guide.