Yes, a half-sleep mode should be well under 5mA. Hopefully well under 1mA, but I don’t recall offhand what the sleep mode power is with WDT enabled. The full standby mode is only like 0.02mA, which is nice, but it doesn’t wake up unless the button is pressed.
Using moon mode wouldn’t reduce power use. Idle mode with the MCU running is ~5mA, and moon mode is ~7mA. This means most of the power in moon mode is wasted just to keep the MCU running, not to make light. I wonder if there’s a way to reduce that without sacrificing any functionality… like maybe turn the ADC off most of the time, or run the MCU at a slower clock speed, or something.
I mean, if you wanted to combine the alarm clock with an all-night moonlight mode, that’s do-able right now with no plumbing changes. But the high idle power has been bugging me anyway, so I should try to fix it. And a half-sleep mode is probably worth adding to the toolkit.
It’s a good idea; I just need to add some extra plumbing to make it feasible without wasting lots of power. I have other plumbing to add too, like an option to use “short click, long click, or hold” instead of just “click, or hold”. That one is mostly for the Russian crowd though, since I haven’t seen that type of UI anywhere else.
If you need any reasons to get firmware flashing equipment, there are plenty of reasons at the links in my signature.