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Comment by birdmanjeremy | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how long the battery lasts? I've been playing with the ESP8266 chips as well, and they're great. Haven't had a chance to hook them up to a battery yet or test more precise power consumption.

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Running all the time you'll drain a 1000 mAh battery in an hour or two, but if you aggressively deep sleep and wake infrequently you can easily get a month. That's about the limit though, you aren't going to be able to do a year or so like you can with other technologies, at least not in a device that reports data at a useful frequency.

Wifi is high bandwidth and ubiquitous, but it uses a lot of power. Other options are better if power or long range is your goal.

...1000 mAh...

I know I'm being silly, but I always giggle when I see it written like this.

Normally I do to, but in this case there's good reason to talk about thousands of mAh's instead of Ah's, which is that the typical sort of things you'd power with these batteries have current draw in the mA range, so mA's are the natural unit to use.

It's like measuring energy in Joules normally versus talking about electron volts for chemistry or mega-/giga-/tera- electron volts for nuclear physics (depending on the flavor).

It depends on the battery, of course. I don't have my kit with me right now, or I'd measure for you, but I think it's about 70 mA connected to a nearby wifi.

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