RE:GENESIS
Adaptive electronics recovery platform—computer vision, BOM completeness audits, RVS-ranked disassembly plans, and KMS-signed Second-Life Passports for enterprise hardware before shredding.
Overview
The Problem
Most e-waste workflows destroy still-valuable GPUs, RAM, and SSDs for bulk metal recovery, with no tamper-evident lineage for secondary markets and opaque environmental claims.
The Solution
RE:GENESIS treats retired servers and laptops as recoverable products: ingest an interior photo, run hybrid YOLO or catalog-assisted detection, audit BOM completeness, plan teardown with a Reuse Value Score, simulate diagnostics, and issue KMS-signed Second-Life Passports with honest impact ranges.
The Purpose
Built for Environmental Hacks (Bharat Builds Tour, e-waste track) to demonstrate an end-to-end AWS pipeline—vision, orchestration, cryptography, and operator UI—that judges and operators can trace stage by stage.
Technical
Architecture
React UI on S3 static hosting talks to API Gateway → ingest Lambda → Step Functions `RecoveryFlow` (detect → parse → audit → plan → test → passport → impact). SageMaker serves YOLOv8n with catalog-assisted fallback; Tesseract OCR can confirm model plates; DynamoDB stores devices, components, and events; passports are canonical JSON signed with AWS KMS and verified via API.
Decisions & Challenges
Major challenges included hybrid vision when the SageMaker endpoint is cold or low-confidence, preventing single-zone failures from collapsing the pipeline, keeping a stable nine-class detection schema across training and inference, and deploying a production UI bundle that calls API Gateway directly without a same-origin proxy.
Impact
Outcome Achieved
Delivered the live multi-page UI, full recovery workflow with visible stage progression, passport verify/tamper demo, impact metrics with cited LCA ranges, SageMaker training/serving scripts, and documented demo path for upload → detect → plan → passport → verify.
Real World Relevance
Circular economy and ITAD platforms; computer vision on hardware teardown; regulated reuse credentials; Step Functions–style auditable pipelines; hackathon-grade AWS architecture with operable fallbacks.