The goal is to operate a mesh with small batteries or a small solar panel for several days.
My requirement is that I only want to switch on the meshnodes at predefined times and otherwise the device goes into deep sleep via shutdown. The firmware already contains the functionality to synchronize the time via the mesh. What is still missing is the option to define a schedule, e.g. for a solar-powered router node.
Example: Multiple solar routers and sensor nodes with 500mAh battery and ESP32 chip should bridge 10 days without sun. With 25mA consumption, that would be 20 hours continuously or 2 hours per day. The 120 minutes per day could be divided into 8 * 15 minutes or 12 * 10 minutes.
The feature would also be backwards compatible with old versions because the mesh network connects regularly. Nodes send a nodeinfo after waking up and old/normal nodes respond with their nodeinfo.
If this is combined with router nodes and the Store&Forward module, the routers could use the regular time window for the asynchronous exchange of messages. Store&Forward is used as a buffer.
Every hour, 5 minutes or 8.3% of time could be used for communication. This would also comply with the legal restrictions in some countries.
I could imagine the configuration with two parameters: Duration of the transmission time in seconds (e.g. 300) and interval in seconds (e.g. 3600). The start is always at midnight.