>> sensibly run off a small battery for days on end.
Could you please offer more details? what kind of application, what kind of battery and estimated power consumption ?
Could you please offer more details? what kind of application, what kind of battery and estimated power consumption ?
Of course aggressive power management (ie putting the mcu to sleep) could significantly extend the battery life. According to the datasheet the current consumption at sleep can be as low as 0.5mA, full two orders of magnitude difference. The standby current is in microampere range.
In comparison BBB consumes "210-460mA @5V", which would correspond to 1-3 hours on 2xAA alkalines (assuming ideal voltage converter).
At the moment I've got the KickStarter board down to 4mA when idle (as it can sleep) - when executing code I think it's around 40mA. Hopefully by release time I'll have sorted out a few glitches and got it down to under 1mA idle (in the range zokier noted).
Note that with something like 'setInterval(doStuff, 1000)' the processor will be idle for 99% of the time.
Running off a li-ion battery from an old Nokia phone (700mAh) you could then expect Espruino to run for almost a month. Using the battery out of my Galaxy S3 (2100mAh) it'd run for almost 3 months.