That's great to know. I'm just finishing up an sms messaging water detector. My next project is going to be a small mesh network in the woods. Haven't seen any range tests yet, so this is great news.
Instead of a WiFi mesh at 2.4GHz, why not a low-power radio like the RFM69 with a much longer range? I'm assuming your next project also requires low data rates like the water detector.
I'd like to test the bluetooth functionality of the ESP32 to see power consumption of that vs wifi. My requirement will be cell phones connecting to this mesh network. Data rates aren't a concern for the next project. The mesh nodes should connect to each other. And on everyone's phone, it should look like one wireless network.
I'm using an amica nodemcu board paired with a sainrite water level sensor. It's powered off of a cell phone battery charger for now. The code is all in C. I use twilio to send texts.
The final thing I need to build is a way to wake the device up from sleep when water is detected. Doing so should let it run for a very long time. (year(s)) I have a few ideas for a solution, but have been swamped lately.
Nice writeup. Someone gave me a great idea of running an ATTiny to send a wake command to the ESP when water is detected. I'm going to try a few different ways and compare battery usage.
