I am building out my first self-designed project and am a bit unsure how to proceed with the power setup. I'm making a sensor device that will send me a tweet whenever the relative moisture of my plant gets low. I plan on making one for each potted plant in the house (a dozen or so), so want to keep things cheap and also not need to be near an outlet.
I have all the code working fine, but not sure what to do with regards to power. I am using an ESP8266-01 wifi module (this one) that has 8 pins (2 IO, TX, RX, 3.3V, GND, reset) with this soil sensor, which need 3.3V, gnd, and output connect.
I guess I don't get how I can power both the ESP-01 and the sensor. I don't want to use a full Uno or something, to keep the price minimal. So much I see online seems to say I should be able to use just these two components. But I don't see how.
I have a bunch of adafruit trinket m0 boards, which give me battery/usb in, but only one 3.3V out. So, I could set the code up to use the trinket as the control that reads the sensor and then passes the readings to the ESP-01. But there aren't enough power outs on the trinket?
Should i set up two battery supplies, one for the wifi and one for the sensor, or can I somehow combine the two off the one 3.3V output from the trinket?
Total newbie on power setup, so please forgive if these are dumb questions.
EDIT: To clarify, per the comments:
In an "ideal" world, the ESP-01 wifi module would run the code that both reads the sensor and send the tweet containing the sensor data. If I could figure out how to both power the ESP-01 and the sensor without using the trinket, that would be what I would prefer.
Barring that, I would use the trinket to read the sensor, then use the trinket to send the data re: sensor data to ESP-01 to POST the tweet. Basically making the trinket the power hub, I guess.
If I can just set up a power source and splice the wires off to the ESP-01 and sensor, great. But would that work?
I assume I would need to use the trinket if I don't want to worry about stepping down power and whatnot, so would a splice still have enough power for both the 3.3V ESP-01 and the 3.3V sensor?
If so, for the future, how to I determine that?
