1.8 KiB
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.