TAG
Battery-powered Arduino projects fail in two ways: unstable wake cycles and hidden current draw. I start by listing every component in active and sleep state, then I budget power in milliamp-hours before writing firmware.
LoRa is chosen for range and efficiency, but many nodes still miss battery targets by a large margin. The reason is usually poor budgeting assumptions and missing field validation.
Unstable power is behind a large share of embedded bugs: random resets, noisy ADC values, communication drops, and drifting sensor readings. Good power design is often the highest-leverage hardware improvement.
