If the led is connected to a GPIO simply turn off the led before going into Deep Sleep.
Of course if the led is directly wired to the main power supply you have to detach it in some way, may be using a simple small MOSFET transistor and disable it when the ESP is going to deep sleep.

Amazing how time flies. Apologies for waking an old comment.

My solution would involve “jumpers” or some such thing pulling an input one way or the other and have the code not do the deep sleep. That way there’s no race after a reset (or wake from the previous deep sleep). So, it’s a “disable deep sleep”, “debug”, “program” human control.

Of course it does require a spare GPIO pin. On the plus side, no trying to reconfigure circuits on the fly.

Hi.
It doesn’t matter.
You can put everything on the setup() because it will only run once.
But, you can also put it on the loop() even though it will just run once (just make sure the deep sleep function is just called at last).
Regards,
Sara

Thanks for sharing your results.
Regards,
Sara

In my case, I need to send pool temperature to the server each minute. For the pool, I will not use power supply for security reasons.

To powering with batteries, we need to limit the current and time needed to run our application.

Using the minimum hardware possible.
Using ESP-NOW and not WIFI because ESP-NOW transmit data without the need of maintaining permanant WiFi connection.
Setting the ESP in deep sleep mode for a maximum of time, waking up only for getting the data and transmit.

I choosed ESP12F because in all other development bords, only the ESP8266 can be set in deepsleep mode, but USB to serial device stay powered.
I uses a pack of 4 AA batteries and a voltage regulator (MCP1702 3.3 volts: dropout = 0.75V, quescient current = 2 uA )
To keep 3.3V on the ESP8266, the batteries voltage must be 3.3V + 0.75V = 4.05 Volts minimum.
The total current in deep sleep is now 12 uA.

After powerup, the code need to make a pairing with the server, this takes less 2.5 seconds running time.

Searching 1-wire bus
End of search : 18ms
Setup done
Pairing request on channel 1
Pairing request on channel 2
Pairing request on channel 3
Pairing request on channel 4
Pairing request on channel 5
Pairing done on channel 6 in 2333ms for 78:e3:6d:09:fc:89
Send data of device 1
I'm awake from 2366ms , but I'm going into deep sleep mode for 10 seconds


After wakeup, the running time is less then 350ms

Searching 1-wire bus
End of search : 18ms
Setup done
Pairing request on channel 5
Pairing done on channel 6 in 285ms for 78:e3:6d:09:fc:89
Send data of device 1
I'm awake from 318ms , but I'm going into deep sleep mode for 10 seconds


To perform a test in a reasonable time, I make tests with a sleep time of 10 seconds and, after 1 month, the battery voltage is about 4 volts.
So, if I need a transmission each minute, the 4 AA battery can do the job at least for 6 months (in Canada, we don’t have 6 months of summer time!).

You state the to upload the code to the board the wire to the RST pin has to be disconnected. But if you’re using OTA to upload the code then you don’t have access to the board to manually disconnect the wire to RST. Is there a way to implement recovery from deep sleep when using OTA?