The $30 Swiss Army Knife for Makers
The $30 Waveshare ESP32-C6 board is an all-in-one electronics prototyping platform with an AMOLED touchscreen and a slew of sensors.
Sometimes just the thought of choosing components, designing a PCB, and assembling and testing the hardware is enough to kill a perfectly good idea for a new electronic gadget. That’s a lot of work, and when we are deciding what to do with our free time, work is not usually the number one choice. It is for this reason that hobbyists need to have tools available to them that will help them cut some corners to get a prototype up and running quickly.
The Waveshare ESP32-C6 1.8-inch Touch AMOLED Display Development Board is one such tool. It’s a tiny device that can fit in the palm of your hand; however it’s loaded down with just about everything but the kitchen sink. Having so many hardware components in a ready-to-go device makes it easy to start building everything from IoT devices to AI-powered voice assistants and smart home dashboards.
As the name implies, the device is built around an ESP32-C6 microcontroller with dual processing cores, 512KB of SRAM, and 16MB of flash memory. It can wirelessly interface with other devices through Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, or Thread. For user interface development, the device is equipped with a 1.8-inch capacitive AMOLED touchscreen display with 368x448-pixel resolution. You’ll also find an accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, speaker, real-time clock, and a 250mAh rechargeable battery onboard.
The ESP32-C6 1.8-inch Touch AMOLED Display Development Board can be both charged and programmed via a USB-C port. Firmware can be loaded via either the ESP-IDF framework or the Arduino IDE, depending on your preference.
At under $30, this is a tool worth picking up just to keep on hand. You never know when that next great idea is going to pop into your mind, and this could be the ideal platform for bringing that idea to life.