Shipped: the map
Trash Trail v1 is live. What’s on it, concretely:
- 550+ litter observations, 16 watersheds tracked in DC, Maryland, and Virginia — fused from resident reports, DC 311 service requests, OpenLitterMap imports, and curated community records.
- The water connection. Watersheds carry their EPA ATTAINS assessment status; Anacostia branches show an impaired · trash badge straight from the Clean Water Act listings. Tap a report and the map names the drinking-water intake it drains toward.
- Cited provenance. The ⓘ Sources sheet lists every upstream source per watershed with fetch dates. Solid watershed outline = EPA-assessed; dashed = never assessed. Absence of data is drawn differently from a clean bill of health.
- The cleanup ledger. “How much did you pick up?” in bag-sized buckets, org and crew accounts, volunteer hours, and a funder-shaped export for cleanup organizations.
- Custom cartography. MapLibre GL over locally-baked PMTiles, with a custom WebGL additive-light renderer — reports read as points of light in dark water. New reports reach other viewers in about five seconds.
- Open commons. The corpus publishes as versioned CC-BY-SA-4.0 GeoJSON snapshots, downloadable from the Sources sheet.
All of it runs inside a $5/month AWS budget: Aurora scale-to-zero, DynamoDB read path, static vector tiles, no tile server, no fleet of always-on anything.
In flight: the App Store
The iOS shell (Capacitor, Swift PM) builds and runs in the simulator. Icon, screenshots, privacy answers, and in-app account deletion are done. What remains is Apple developer enrollment and review.
The robot bench, honestly
- Pi 5 delivered and benchmarked (the 2.13 FPS sustained COCO-baseline soak from May still stands as the edge-feasibility number).
- Litter detector v2 (RF-DETR-S) trained — ~3× the v1 baseline on our internal validation split, hard-negative false positives halved. Internal val only; hazard-class recall is still 0.0 and we say so.
- Frame build is blocked on one item: the supplier canceled the aluminum order. Re-buy, cut, drill — tooling is already on the bench.
- Field pickups: 0. No chassis on a route yet. That number stays on the front page until it isn’t true.