Ikea ladda 2600mAh ni-mh for 5,5GBP (about 6€)
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Not bad at all for the price. By my calculations 8 of these should last about 28 days which is almost exactly the same as the 6600mAh 3.7v battery but at half the price.
I will need to factor in that I’d need a battery holder with this setup whereas the lithium battery I wouldn’t. I’d also need a trip to Ikea and those trips are always expensive 
.
I’ll do some weighing up…
On the plus side for AA Ni-Mh I will add:
- easily replaceable with any other brand if exhausted/damaged
- rechargeable with cheap and available chargers
- will not take fire spontaneously
- if later you find a better solution, can still use them in your TV remote
P.S. I never managed to get out of Ikea spending less than 50€ 
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New thought: Solar panel!
I shouldn’t imagine it would take much to drive 5ma and the camera is already pointing outside. I’ll do some digging…
UPDATE: I had some issues with the Pololu power control board not supplying the full 5v. I’ve ditched this now and replaced it with a simple logic level n-channel MOSFET.
I have a small 5v solar panel to test out as well. I’m just gonna run the setup for a week with the MOSFET in place just so that I can make sure that’s all good. Then I’ll add the solar panel and see if it extends the life of the battery.
Any updates Adam? How you getting on mate?
I was thinking why can you not put your esp8266 in deep sleep and then turn your camera on?
Good job. But I’m not sure does it worth the effort just to ditch a cable to the camera.
After having smart home with few dozens battery powered sensors for more than a year, I feel tired of changing batteries. Now I prefer everything to be wired.
Yeah, why not configure this to run off of the doorbell’s voltage?
So I set the solar panel up but unfortunately there is not enough sunlight where the camera is mounted to provide any charge. The battery ran out in about 5 days which is what I was finding without the panel.
If I did this I would need something local to the ESP to trigger the wake-up. Traditionally this would be the doorbell but this would go against my second main ambiton:
I could use the RF receiver to wake it up but then the setup would be worse as the ESP would be using power in deep sleep (whereas at the moment it’s completely off).
I’m starting to feel the same 
. Unfortunately there are no power sockets anywhere near my front door and so I would need to run something substantial if I went down the powered route.
Unfortunately there is no existing power run to my doorbell. I’m using a Xiaomi Smart Switch.
The camera is back in my project box for the moment. I think a bigger battery is the answer but other projects have my interest at the moment 
. I’l post back here when I pick it back up again.
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