I know this is an old topic, but it seems tried and true, so.. How is everyone's experience with this design sofar? Has it been reliable? How far has the 24 month battery life claim held up?
I've been looking for a detection node that I could use for various tasks around the house (Motion detect, reed switch detect, even a simple door bell). But with a plain arduino pro mini I keep running into abysmal battery life. However this setup seems to handle a year on some AA batteries quite easily?
If I can get some confirmation on the reliability on these, I can pull the trigger on producing a handful of these slimnodes. 
