On the rtlduino, are there any specs that has power consumption of say wifi on constant or wifi and bluetooth constant , in mah. Where am going with this is, for a drone application the rtlduino is piggybacked to drone and acting as a wifi repeater to a ground station rtlduino. Also in case the drone does a fly away,and after 40 minutes of uptime the ble beacon activates to help in possibly locating the drone. From simple trial I know the wifi will run by itself with the self contained 250mah lipo battery for about 3.5 hours.
Have not figured out how to get code for the BLE to turn on after 45 minutes of uptime, and am wondering how much time will be left in the battery for the BLE to run ( for search time) .
Hope this makes sense.
In AN0400 Application Note, Chapter 15 on Power Save, there is a table giving typical power consumption when using WiFi under different conditions. Since in your application, the WiFi should be basically transmitting all the time, using the highest power consumption should be reasonable.
BLE shares the same radio as WiFi, and when both are active, the radio time is split between them. In general, BLE has a shorter range and uses less power compared to WiFi, especially when only broadcasting as a beacon. You could assume equal power consumption as WiFi to be conservative.
For the timer, you could look into attaching an external RTC, or using the inbuilt hardware RTC peripheral in the chip. The RTC will take care of counting seconds, and you could find a method to take note of the starting time, and check if 40 mins has elapsed before starting BLE.