MySensors - A great way to add sensors to your home

[Ryan McLean]

Jeff et.all

I was able to poke around the MySensors website a bit more. They have done
some maths and are quoting theoretical battery life of ~20 months on a pair
of AAs. However! Big catch here. That is based on a "duty rate" of 1 sample
every 15 minutes -- 4 transmits an hour. If I want 60 transmits an hour,
now my battery life is going to drop considerably. That's assuming their
maths are right, but I've got no better information to go off of.

Source: http://www.mysensors.org/build/battery

Some of the things I was reading this weekend, and seemed to make sense to
me -- you can get an Arduino down to pretty low power (±self discharge rate
of the batteries) sleeping, so it's actually the radio transmitting that is
the "constraining factor" to battery life on these. I had found some info
on people using WiFi chips, but they seemed to be a pretty poor choice *for
battery powered devices* because it takes a few seconds to power up the
radio, register with the network, transmit...WiFi (and the IP backbone it
uses to communicate) was just not built with this kind of application in
mind. The Xbees and some others (433 Mhz radios...) have got more battery
friendly protocols.

All really fascinating stuff, please if you end up with some "first hand"
data (Particularly around battery life) pass it along.
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