Wasted Space

F&P has three double berths and a smaller berth what would qualify as a double on most sailboats.  And honestly, if it is cold AF out, cozying up with a partner in a small berth is peak boatlife.

She also requires a lot of supplies and spares.  Two of those berths are full of mostly unorganized stuff.  I've been plugging away at organizing things.  Materials like metal and paper require extra care in the humid saltwater environment.  Lowes has these tough little stackable boxes.  They are called 'trailboxes' and are very economical.  They come in a few sizes, have channels for straps, locking handles and don't get brittle when they are cold.  

For every problem there is a solution and vise versa.

I have a dozen of these boxes, each with dozens (or more) of assorted things inside.  They are stacked neatly in the empty berths and from the outside they are all identical. This leads to a situation where I don't want to fully pack them, because then I can't find things.  So, most of them are mostly empty with a layer of stuff on the bottom.8

And this is why I have two berths full of stuff.  I need to pack more efficiently, and in a manner where I can find stuff.

So far I'm resisting the urge to over-engineer this using adhesive NFC tags to track the contents of each crate.  Some of these tags have an astonishing 1MB of storage.  The ones that I've found via retail channels only have about 500 bytes of read/write storage.  Enough to track a dozen items, but not more.

Ideally each container's NFC tag would have it's manifest stored in it.  A simple phone app would read and write records.

Otherwise I need a small database server onboard .  I were to do such a thing couchdb is very attractive.  I'm not going to delve into CAP therom in my sailing blog.  Vast restraint on my part.  

Or, a simple K/V HTTP service running on the ESP32 system on a chip.  I haven't found an existing project, but this shouldn't take more than a few hours to code.  What a world we live in.