What?

The esp32, and in particular the Xiao Seeed esp32c6 (and esp32c3) are small, versatile and fast microcontrollers.
It’s a RISC-V processor with:

• wifi/bluetooth/zigbee/thread/matter
• all the interfaces one could possibly need: I2C/UART/SPI/GPIO/ADC/…
• battery charging circuit (100ma)
• sleep and deep sleep mode (down to ~15μA !!)

Why this device?

Compatibility

I’ve been using Rust for practically everything and wanted a device that had good compatibility. So there’s The Rust on ESP Book .

The ESP-IDF (IoT Development Framework) is primarily written in C and has great support for C++. So there are options.

Capability

I’ve used it for a plethora of projects:

• mobile thermometer (using bme280): uses deep sleep and wakes up every hour to send data to influxdb
• electronic dice (using msa311 triple-axis accellerometer) using i2c for msa311 and oled display
• remote power switch for my ASUS Z10Pe-D16 workstation (connected to StandBy power)
• LED strip controller with web interface
• Analog interface for a raspberry pi to measure power consumption using SCT-013 30A sensors
• remote scale to weigh gastanks using 4 50kg load cells in wheatstone bridge config
• Lithium-ion and lipo battery charger (esp32c3 has higher load current)
• wireless light switch over Thread for a room where the bed is in the only corner without lightswitches.
• car proximity detection using BLE for smart driveway lights
• home thermostat controller with relay, to replace the stupidly annoying BTicino BTL4441, as part of the home temperature system (zones, ..)
• …

Availability

The device is available through different sources at decent prices.

Where to start

• Xiao Seeed website for esp32c6
• Great online web interface to explore the device: ESPConnect
• Starterkit in C on github (under construction)
  • ✅ with provisioning for wifi using wifi Access Point mode
  • example implementations for
    • ⬜ reading battery voltage using voltage divider (ADC)
    • ⬜ i2c sensor
    • ⬜ spi sensor
    • ⬜ UART sensor
    • ✅ webserver
    • ✅ ntp time sync and uptime keeping
    • …
• Starterkit in Rust (under construction)

Some alternatives considered

• Raspberry Pi Pico 2W
• stm32
• ATtiny

I’ll post links to the github repos of each project later. To be continued ..