A little gem - The Yaorea YRG01 (Review & Mod)

Each one took about 2 weeks/10 business days. I think they put the long shipping window in case they are behind or something. I've seen quite a few sellers doing that. This one I ordered on 16th April and it landed today (28th April).

If you do mod yours like mine, be careful soldering to the SMD components. Be especially careful with L12 - the inductor for the pulse wire. Too much heat, or for too long will desolder the entire inductor. Also on the 8-pin IC, be careful not to put too much solder on and short the two terminals as you would be shorting the 3.3v supply and may blow the regulator. Oh and take the battery out! And last of all, the front board can be a bit fiddly and the screen tends to flap about in the breeze when the board is taken out, so be careful with the ribbon. Oh, and be careful with the interconnecting ribbon too, especially if it looks rough like mine. Try not to bend it too much. If you have a PCB vice or clamp or something, it might help.

Yeah, it works fine without the battery, although it makes a bit of a whining noise. Sounds like an inductor 'singing'. The other caveat is the battery is required for the clock, so without a battery when the USB is unplugged the date/time will revert to 00:00 01/01/2023. If using the internal data logging capability then this would be a pain, but if using ESPGeiger or similar then it is probably not an issue.

On my modified YGR01 (at 5V USB input and full battery) it consumes 29mA without BLE and the ESP8266. With BLE and the ESP8266 enabled it consumes ~108mA. When charging the battery you can add about 450-500mA on top, although this decreases when the battery is nearly full.

So with the ESP8266 enabled (and BLE, and assuming the battery is charged) it would consume 2.6A/day at 5V input and that translates to around 3.5A/day running at 3.7v (nominal LIPo). So if your batteries were 2.6Ah then you would need roughly 40 LIPo cells to run the YGR01 for 30 days. If you are pulling ~300mA (CAJOE + ESP) then you would need roughly 120 LIPo's to last 30 days.

Probably best to run on a PSU! 

I have had some issues with cheap PSUs in the past causing noise on the counter - extra spurious counts and spikes, so if you can try and use one that is a fairly high quality, or better still and old linear power supply with proper transformer and linear regulator.