DFRobot's Beetle ESP32-C3 Is a Compact RISC-V Dev Board Targeting the Internet of Things
Priced at under $8, including bundled expansion board with ribbon-cable connector for an optional display, this board is feature-packed.
DFRobot has announced the launch of a compact microcontroller board built with the Internet of Things (IoT) in mind, and using the free and open source RISC-V instruction set architecture: the Beetle ESP32-C3, plus bundled expansion board for easier wiring.
"The ultra-small size of Beetle ESP32-C3 would help users to overcome the size limitation easier, and no longer are subjected to the size limitation of the master controller," says DFRobot's Eddard Zhu of the new board design. "Soldering would be made difficult due to the inappropriate power pin design in many controller designs. The extension board has been optimally designed to add GDI and more power pins for easier soldering, when connecting Beetle ESP32-C3 to sensors or a screen."
As the name implies, the Beetle ESP32-C3 is built around Espressif's ESP32-C3 microcontroller module — meaning that it's driven by a single 32-bit RISC-V processor core running at 160MHz with 400kB of static RAM (SRAM), 384kB of internal flash plus 4MB of external flash, and with 8kB of additional SRAM available from the on-board real-time clock.
For connectivity, the module — which DFRobot is positioning for the IoT — includes 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi connectivity on the 2.4GHz spectrum, Bluetooth 5 Low Energy (BLE) and Bluetooth Mesh support, plus 13 digital input/output pins, six-channel pulse-width modulation (PWM), one SPI bus, one I2C bus, one I2S bus, two UART buses, two each of infrared receive and transmit channels, two 12-bit analogue to digital converters (ADCs) with up to six channels, and a DMA controller with three receive and three transmit channels.
The compact board — with a footprint of just 25×20.5mm (around 0.98×0.8") — breaks out its general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins to headers at either side; a bundled breakout board, meanwhile, piggybacks onto the board and offers additional power and GPIO pins, battery terminals for the on-board lithium-ion management system, and a ribbon cable connector for an optional display.
The new board bundle is now available from the DFRobot site, priced at $7.90 before volume discounts with support in the Arduino IDE, Espressif ESP-IDF< MicroPython, C, and Python.