After my last post here work got crazy busy and I had no time for electronics for many months. The auto-watering system never went any further (yet). In my business it happens routinely. The past few months I'm finally somewhat caught up for a while and have had some time for futzing around with microcontrollers and electronics again. I got a couple Raspberry Pi Pico boards and had a play. Excellent boards - very inexpensive.
Then just recently got a Canaduino STM32 Black Pill. Nice board. I put MicroPython on it. That was quite a job. Building the toolchain and compiling and installing that with online help that was minimal and often wrong, or missing steps, took a long time to get right. The one place that had the correct info was nebelgrau77's Git page. All the others were wrong or missing so much that they were useless.
When I ordered it I didn't understand that the "Pro" version has the extra 16MB of flash memory on board, and that the one I ordered does not. Without it you have something like 45K of memory to work with after installing MicroPython. That's pretty tiny. So I'll have to order a memory chip and solder it on, and then probably install a different MicroPython file so the memory can be used. What fun!
