# 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.

## 20221024

I have discovered this germany shop called AZDelivery. It's heaven. They have
plenty of good stuff, all in stock, free deliveries with a relatively low
basket value and they offer volume-discounts. It's sad that we don't have such
a page here in Spain and we get pushed to look for this kind of service
outside.

But for now, I have found a guy in my neighbourhood that sells exactly the
moisture sensors I intend to try. Sometimes fortune smiles on us. I'll get in
touch with him to get the sensors this week. With that, I can keep on
experimenting and designing the device.

## 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.
-