Can ESPHome support the low quiescent power feature of newer ESP32 Development Boards ?

[donburch888]

Describe your core improvement

I understand that older/cheaper Development Boards were powered from USB, and so the low power feature of ESP32 chips were irrelevant; and consequently it wasn't important in the early development of ESPHome. But now there are an increasing number of Dev Boards designed to be battery powered.

The most obvious thing is to turn off multiple i2c devices when the ESP32 chip is asleep - which can be achieved on the older boards by connecting the i2c VCC line to a GPIO pin instead. I see this has been discussed before, including Add priority configuration to i2c bus to allow users to power down during sleep #3069 which reveals that there is an undocumented setup_priority: option to adjust where in on_boot priority the i2c initialise occurs. ssieb on Mar 3, 2025 commented:

It's not documented because we don't want people generally using it as it's more likely to cause problems than fix them.

Presumably this is because the issue is more complicated than engineers can explain ... but is it really impossible ? No doubt there are other related issues.

It seems to me as though a major re-think of ESPHome may be appropriate - along the scale of the recent Wi-fi, memory and processor optimisations.

Current limitations

see above

Technical benefits

1. support the low power feature of ESP32 chips
2. especially for the increasing number of dev boards with integrated LiPo battery
3. continues to focus on IoT
4. reduce the number of people saying that ESP32 is shit, and telling people to use other devices

Additional context

No response