You use “customers” as if this were trying to be a full product. This is a weekend hack. Of course there’s going to be low-hanging fruit that could be optimized away.
Stop shitting on the guy’s earnest enjoyment. What you’re doing is akin to going to your favorite package’s issues tracker and making a P0 request like “rewrite it in rust, python sucks”
it's not a weekend hack, it's a commercial product, designed and built by a team of several people. the weekend hackers are the intended customers, not the makers. they have 50 prototype units in stock, and they're taking preorders for two more larger batches which they expect to ship in august and september. august is 70 days away, an interval which is 35 times larger than a weekend
the 'weekend' aspect is how long the user should expect it to work for, not how long they've spent on developing it
unfortunately, their current design seems to have a fatal flaw that renders it useless for its intended purpose, but one that's easily fixed
my comments are not shitting on it; they explain how to fix it, providing information the original designers were evidently unaware of, so that they can ship a product that fulfills its intended purpose
that's the plan i described yesterday in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35983387
that's the plan i think will give you three hours of battery life: 2 amp hours times 3.7 volts divided by 2.5 watts gives 3 hours of use. 36 5-minute timeouts. do you have a different estimate? did i miscalculate?
that's not a weekend
in that comment i also explained an approach that would beat that by two orders of magnitude if you applied it with the same components (though there i supposed the hardware would use an esp32)
btw my grandparent comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35984332 is upvoted to 11 at the moment so evidently even if you think it's stupid your customers don't