Estimate idealized battery life from repeating operating phases.
Answer first
Enter usable battery capacity plus sleep, active, and optional Wi-Fi current and duration. The estimator calculates average current, energy per cycle, cycles per day, duty cycle, and idealized runtime. Use measured current for your actual board and include regulator loss, battery aging, temperature, self-discharge, cutoff voltage, and radio retries before planning deployment.
Valid range 0 to 50,000 mAh
How much of the rated capacity is usable before cutoff voltage - derating for age, temperature, and discharge curve.
Valid range 0 to 100,000 µA
Valid range 0 to 604,800 s
Valid range 0 to 1,000 mA
Valid range 0 to 60,000 ms
Valid range 0 to 1,000 mA
Valid range 0 to 60,000 ms
Estimate, not a measurement: this assumes constant battery-side current in each phase. Real battery life varies with regulator losses, battery age, temperature, self-discharge, voltage limits, and radio behavior.
Design guide
Technical content reviewed
Worked approach
Begin with datasheet values to compare architectures, then measure the complete board during sleep, startup, sensing, processing, and transmission. Replace estimates with measurements and rerun the same duty cycle.
Common decisions
USB converters, regulators, LEDs, dividers, pull resistors, and attached modules can keep drawing current while the ESP32 sleeps. Measure the complete board rather than using the chip number alone.
No. Available capacity depends on chemistry, discharge rate, temperature, age, cutoff voltage, and the load profile. Use a conservative usable-capacity percentage and the battery datasheet.
Measure the current and duration across multiple real reconnections, including failed attempts. Use a representative or conservative value rather than the shortest successful trace.
Related build evidence
This portable sensing prototype connects hardware, vision development, and an interface. It provides adjacent system evidence and does not claim a measured runtime equal to this calculator's estimate.
See the projectApply it to real hardware
Share the battery, board, sensors, radio schedule, wake triggers, regulator, and target service interval. Measurements can replace assumptions as the prototype develops.
Discuss the system