Brian’s fitness journal after a brain stroke
Today, my wife had an important work meeting that kept her away from home for most of the day, and she probably won’t be free until fairly late this evening. Meanwhile, I had my own agenda. After finishing the lawn mowing, I turned my attention to a solar panel and backup battery that we recently acquired from my mother.
There was just one small problem. It didn’t come with instructions. Normally, this would hardly qualify as an emergency. We have the internet, after all, and somewhere online there is almost certainly a manual explaining exactly how everything works.
But then I considered the purpose of the equipment. We would most likely need a solar panel and backup battery during a power outage. A power outage is also precisely the sort of situation in which discovering that you don’t know how to operate your emergency power supply becomes somewhat inconvenient. Even better, if the outage also disrupts our internet connection, the online manual would suddenly become considerably less useful.
There is something wonderfully circular about needing electricity and internet access to learn how to use the equipment intended to help you when you don’t have electricity or internet access. So, while everything is working perfectly well, I plan to find the correct manual online and print a copy.
Sometimes preparedness is simply solving tomorrow’s problem while Google is still available. The solar equipment may eventually have another purpose as well. My wife has informed me that she wants to use it to power some sort of outdoor robots she is planning to build. I don’t entirely know what these robots will do.
Knowing her, however, I suspect gardening is involved. For quite some time, she has talked about building something similar to a FarmBot. It is an automated gardening system that can help monitor and care for plants. She even studied Python with that project in mind.
So apparently, while I have been looking at our solar panel and thinking, emergency electricity, my wife has been looking at the same equipment and thinking, robot agriculture.
Both seem perfectly reasonable. For now, my goal is considerably simpler. Find and print the manual. Learn how the equipment works before we actually need it.
The garden robots can come later.
Although, knowing my wife, I probably shouldn’t be surprised if one day I look out the window and discover that the tomatoes have acquired technical support.