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Can they really last that long (on their own)? I looked into this when the ESP8266 first became popular maybe 4 years ago as I wanted to build WiFi temperature and humidity sensors. My calculations were that a set of AAA rechargable batteries (~2000mAh) would last a few days at most, with the device in deep sleep most of the time and waking up every 10 mins to take a reading and send it over WiFi. Right now I'm looki…
Personal experience: I have a ESP32 that runs as a sort of weather station. It has a ~2000mAh battery and lasts almost 2 months, getting a data point once every 30 minutes. That is using the ESPHome to program it. Even at once every 10 minutes, it should manage almost 3 weeks without requiring a recharge. Some options that definitely help is to quicken the Wifi reconnect. ESPHome has options to disable AP scanning an…
After a few months it stopped working, I think some moisture got in and the DHT11 failed.