I'm considering building a handheld radio receiver based on an nRF24L01+ and an ATtiny chip. It needs to receive "continuously", to receive a control signal that might operate some attached LEDs or make a tone from the PWM controller. However, due to power concerns of being battery-operated, I wonder if it makes sense to operate the receive in pulses, instead of continuously.
For example, I could have the receiver enabled only 1msec, every 20msec, thus reducing its power requirement to approximately 5% (with a slight hit on the ATtiny of running a timer to perform this, but that's still an overall net saving). This gives a worst-case latency of receiving a signal at around 20msec, which is fine for my purposes of controlling an LED. It means the transmitter should run a strategy of something like transmitting a packet every 500uSec for 25msec, but that's OK because this transmitter is mains-powered so there aren't such concerns of achieving low power there.
Is this a sensible plan? Am I actually likely to achieve a good power saving by such a strategy, at the additional cost of code complexity on the ATtiny, and added on-air congestion from transmitting the same packet 50 up to times?
(See also my related question How does the nRF24L01+ performance degrade with supply voltage?)
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