It's great to know how much current it draws, but that doesn't tell me how much power it draws.
"How powerful is your new car?"
"Oh super powerful! It's got 3 inch diameter fuel lines!" ...
I think a sentence or two later the official site gives an explanation why: lipo battery sizes are measured in mAh, so dividing battery size by current you get hours of operation.
I'm still a noob when it comes to microelectronics, but my understanding is almost every chip runs on 3.3v, lipo batteries are 3.2-3.7v depending on charge level. When they talk about power in amps they assume everyone knows they mean at 3.3v
Other than doing temperature calculations, power is not a very useful metric. And for such calculations you would use a max power rather than average power metric.
If you were optimizing a system for "power" use, it is much easier to work in units of energy than power anyway.
Also specification is pretty clear: 74mA wifi standby, 230mA wifi full speed, 5V input. Input voltage range: 3.6V ~ 6.0V.
Module level specs would be irrelevant in engineering because there is little incentive to use something like this, the radio isn't even certified. On that note, get your popcorn ready for when they ship to German backers and customs proceeds to trash them.
That's why PMUs are used. Just look at bottom side of the PCB - there are three coils, two of them very close to the chip looking pretty much like PMU.
> It is going to either be an LDO, or take a fixed operating voltage.
No, read specification: 3.6 - 6V.
Can you explain why?
You can attach an external circuit to convert to the desired voltage and therefore keep power draw constant. But that takes more space and costs more money.
Throwing away excess voltage as heat is simply easier.
You can ping the ip and it will response. Or you can have telentd running and it will response to user input.