Oh yes, but even better than that. I think the following two things are feasible:
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Since all nodes have a shared notion of the common time, it is super feasible to have nodes stay completely powered down 95% of the time (even including the radio rx which - for the time being - is always powered, but that will change). Because they know time we can (eventually) do cool stuff like “all nodes in the mesh stay completely asleep for 14 out of every 15 seconds.” During that magic second if anyone has messages to send they start sending, and as long as the network is still chatting away all nodes keep forwarding messages as needed. This will dramatically increase battery life - I’ve got some test configurations in the power management spreadsheet which you might find interesting. (There are some other notes about this in docs/software/TODO.md). I’m super excited to work on this someday (or even better - have other folks also work on it
) -
But even without this optimization, one of the reasons I’m excited about @Syed’s product/board is: This board should be able to do exactly what you describe even without having the mesh sleep (because the nrf52 and the sx1262 have absurdly low power draws while in receive mode). According to my spreadsheet his board should be able to run indefinitely as a “router” with a quite small solar cell. So you could place one of these devices (discreetly) in a tree that has good line of sight for a region and it would happily route packets for that whole area (using just a tiny solar cell).