Power consumption

[nitrousnrg]

With the WIFI off the remote had a current draw of only ~30mA, but when the ESPNOW radio is turned ON, the current consumption increases to 100mA.

This reduces the battery runtime to 4 hours or less.

We should aim at 10+ hours of runtime, so let's see if there is a way to optimize this, either by decreasing transmit power or by turning off the radio when not in use.

[nitrousnrg]

espressif/esp-idf#5044

Might be useful info.

So basically it takes this guy 32ms to init-transmit-deinit. That way the rest of the time the radio is turned off, and you can even put the whole ESP32 to sleep.

32ms using a baremetal C code... I don't expect lisp to be that fast.

We are currently sending throttle data very fast, every 20msec. If we relaxed this to 100ms (10Hz), then for 2/3 of the time the ESP can go to sleep. I guess that would cut power by 50%.
If we prove that this actuslly works, the throttle transmit frequency should be easy to change in case users request a sharper throttle response.

We have packets coming from the skate to the remote at very low rate, like 1 every second. We can relax this even more, but we still need a way to sinchronize the remote for that packet reception. I propose a new packet sent every 10 seconds, such that the remote requests skate info and keeps the radio powered until the receiver sends the data.