Work

engineer_log.md

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+# Engineer Log
+
+## 20221023
+
+Today I began designing Tillun. I think Ana would enjoy the name. If the thing
+rolls, I'll gift her one.
+
+Today I have been researching what are my options for the processing unit. I
+think the ESP32 should be the optimal one, but I'm a bit intimidated by jumping
+into that architecture that fast. I've decided it's wiser to stick within the
+Arduino environment for now for two reasons: because I believe this way I'll
+experience a more reasonable learning curve and because I believe that an
+Arduino microcontroller will be more versatile than an ESP32, and I expect to
+be re-using a lot of components from my Tillun experiments for the next
+generations.
+
+It seems the Arduino Nano is the right tool for the job. As far as I could
+tell, there are just a few differences with the Megaboard I'm using. First, it
+has less CPU power and memory, which shouldn't be a problem since the sketch
+that will run this project will be ridicolously short. Second, it has less pins
+and ports. Not a problem either, since I'll probably only need one or two for
+the moisture sensor.
+
+The only problem I might face is that there doesn't seem to be a lot of stock
+in the stores I have checked. Amazon has units, but I refuse to buy from them
+unless they are literally the only option in town.
+
+I also looked a bit into the moisture sensors. I still haven't settled for any
+specific one. It also left me wondering of well can one count on some of these
+sensors being on the market for a long time. It's definetely a design challenge
+if you can't count on that and future alternatives might not work exactly the
+same way or require a different calibration procedure.
+
+## Open topics
+
+- How to measure how much power a circuit is consuming.
+- How to measure how long a battery will last.
+- How to measure how much charge is left in a battery.
+-