Seeed Studio Breaks New Ground with Its First XIAO Development Board to Feature an STMicro STM32

Seeed Studio is growing its tiny XIAO development board ecosystem once again, and its latest model is something of a departure for the family: the first XIAO to feature an STMicroelectronics STM32 microcontroller on board.

"For the first time, an STMicroelectronics MCU [Microcontroller Unit] is at the heart of a XIAO board," says Seeed Studio's Ellie Cai of the company's latest hardware launch. "Built around the STM32C5A3CG, XIAO STM32C5 development board combines native CAN FD (FDCAN), a six-axis IMU [Inertial Measurement Unit] with programmable heating, 16MB of external flash, high-speed external crystal, and the STM32 ecosystem in the compact XIAO form factor."

The XIAO range is designed for maximum functionality in a minimal footprint, packing pin-compatible input/output alongside a USB Type-C port for data and power on a board little larger than your thumbnail. The latest model shares all the same features of its predecessor, but is the first to feature an STMicro STM32 microcontroller — the STM32C5A3CG, which is built around a single Arm Cortex-M33 core running at up to 144MHz and featuring floating-point and digital signal processing (DSP) acceleration. There's 256kB of on-chip static RAM (SRAM) plus 1MB of on-chip flash and 16MB of off-chip flash.

The chip also includes two native CAN FD controllers, designed for industrial and automotive communication, one of which is linked to an on-board Texas Instruments TCAN3403-Q1 transceiver; the other, Seeed explains, is available for use with an external transceiver. An on-board inertial measurement unit (IMU), meanwhile, can track movement while improving accuracy though the use of on-board resistors to heat the chip prior to measurements being captured.

The new XIAO board is now available to order on the Seeed Studio store priced at $9.90 or $10.90 depending on whether you want the input/output pin headers soldered in place or not. The device is supported in the STM32Cube integrated development environment (IDE), MicroPython, or in the Zephyr real-time operating system (RTOS) via PlatformIO. Additional information is available on the Seeed Studio wiki.