A few months ago, we decided to pause a lot of projects in hand to try to thoroughly and deeply study some low-power solutions, and we were fascinated by the TSLR8258 chip (all the chips of Xiaomi Temperature and Humidity Meter 2), which has a very high cost-effective and low power consumption. It supports Zigbee and BLE at the same time.
We disassembled dozens of products based on it in a few months, sourced nearly a hundred related parts, upgraded basic tools for soldering, and did a lot of weird experiments with the code.
Sometimes it was a black hole, but it was still fascinating that despite all the zigbee products (tuya, ekea, aqura) we always wanted to share some of our own ideas, not always with tails (usb-c cables), that we could envision their batteries, their structures with everyone else. That's fascinating, zigbee has high stability, decent power consumption (ble could be a bit lower). We could also include low power low screens as needed (Sharp's reflective LCDs are surprisingly low power, have a dot matrix, and only require a few milliamps).
As crazy and unnecessary as this may seem, we believe it's the best kind of way to give back to you all for your support, and we're hoping that all this enthusiasm will lead us into a kind of exploratory realm a little further down the road, where we'd like to add more battery-enabled products to the SCREEK family (and the kind of products that rarely need a battery change), experiment with it when it's done, and then share it to make new things.
We're looking forward to sharing what comes next, and we're also hoping to take some time to come back and continue building some esphome sensors (we've never given up on it, it just takes some time to put in a period of time to research it).
