Reddit reviews Eveready LED Floating Lantern Flashlight, Battery Powered LED Lanterns for Hurricane Supplies, Survival Kits, Camping Accessories, Power Outages, Batteries Included
We found 2 Reddit comments about Eveready LED Floating Lantern Flashlight, Battery Powered LED Lanterns for Hurricane Supplies, Survival Kits, Camping Accessories, Power Outages, Batteries Included. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Floats for easy water recoveryReady flex Technology; Runs on 2 or 4 D BatteriesFeatures long-lasting LED technology, this ergonomic solution also shines up to 4x brighter than standard LED technologyPowerful beam and extraordinary runtime up to 140 hours (4 heavy duty batteries) or 400 hours (4 Alkaline batteries)Includes two Eveready Super heavy duty D batteries
I just searched "smallest microcontroller with bluetooth" and came up with this: https://www.dfrobot.com/product-1259.html though its not much smaller than the smallest off-the-shelf ESP32 (https://www.aliexpress.com/item/MH-ET-LIVE-ESP32-MINI-KIT-WiFi-Bluetooth-Internet-of-Things-development-board-based-ESP8266-Fully/32819107932.html)
You could probably find schematics of both of those boards online that you could use to rearrange the boards on a custom PCB that better matches the form factor of a flashlight and then have a couple boards made (doesn't seem unreasonable for a engineering degree senior design project). I don't think either board would fit inside a standard flashlight (even a 4D mag light) unless you used one of those lantern style flashlights. That one looks like it would have all kinds of space.
Whoa, talk about cutting it close.
$20 or $30 is a tight budget for a quality AA light.
On your budget, and given the short suspense, any light you have will be better than none. I'd recommend buying one or two cheap ones, using the same battery type, buy several packs of batteries, and then once the storm passes, spend some time reassessing your lighting needs. And budget for buying quality lights of some kind.