thread Sleepy End Device (SED) enhancement

[burundiocibu]

Component name

openthread

Link to component documentation on our website

https://esphome.io/components/openthread/

Describe the enhancement

Currently this component support being a sleepy end device (SED) by setting the poll_period. Works great. So thankful someone coded thread support.

I would like to add another openthread config, (I'm calling it light_sleep, a boolean), that would direct the entire chip to go to esp light sleep until the next poll period comes up. For the esp32-h2 this would allow current draw to go below 1 mA. When just the radio is in light sleep and the stock esphome sw is running, the current draw is over 17 mA. I've no experience with the Nordic thread devices but would imagine the same concept could be applied.

Yes I understand that this may not even be viable with the current esphome architecture but I want to give it a go. (actually I already have it partially implemented). I wanted to announce my intent here in case people wanted to weight in on the concept.

I don't think this would be appropriate to add to the deep_sleep component as the device would both retain state and network membership between reports. I also don't think a general light_sleep component makes sense as it would only work with a niche network protocol. This seems to be coupled to the thread concept of a sleepy end device.

Use cases

Imagine a remote sensor that doesn't need to report at a very fast rate and doesn't have access to mains power. This would allow the use of the esphome api (as opposed to mqtt) to log data with very low energy usage. This would be a much simpler setup than using mqtt as the transport.

Anything else?

No response

[github-actions[bot]]

🏷️ I've automatically added the component: openthread label to help categorize this feature request.