Olimex releases the ESP32-C3-DevKit-LiPo board featuring a low-power RISC-V processor core

Olimex has launched a new ESP32-C3-DevKit-LiPo board built around Espressif’s ESP32-C3 RISC-V processor chip. The development board offers rich wireless connectivity with support for Wi-Fi 4 and Bluetooth 5.0, along with some input/output ports– USB and JTAG.

On the development board is the RISC-V-based system-on-chip, ESP32-C3, a low-power processor clocked at up to a frequency of 160MHz. The system-on-chip is tightly integrated with 400kB of SRAM, 384kB of ROM, and 8kB of additional SRAM in the real-time clock (RTC), and 4MB of embedded flash storage. The ESP32-C3-DevKit-LiPo offers up to 15 general-purpose input/output pins for expansion along with an ICSP connector for reflashing or debugging the bootloader through a JTAG interface.

Olimex describes the ESP32-C3-DevKit-LiPo as an “entry-level RISC-V board”. It comes with an onboard PCB antenna for 2.4GHz IEEE802.11/b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5 connectivity, and an integrated lithium-polymer battery management system with a status LED and a reset button.

For programming, the development board comes with a single USB Type-C port, which is one of the most famous and demanded USB ports in the maker community. Furthermore, it offers a power supply of 5V via the USB Type-C port and has a 2-pin header for the LiPo battery that supports charging. As the ESP32-C3-DevKit-Lipo development board has the ESP32-C3 microcontroller, it supports various frameworks and languages such as Arduino, PlatformIO, Espressif ESP-IDF, and others.

Under the “CERN Open Hardware Licence Version 2 – Strongly Reciprocal”, the board’s open-source hardware and KiCad schematics, the PCB layout along with the ESP32-C3 datasheet, and the technical reference manual have been released on GitHub.

Additionally, Shteryana Shopova used the board for a RISC-V workshop in Bulgaria, where participants could learn how to use the ESP-IDF with a C sample, JTAG debugging with OpenOCD, and she even demonstrated some inline RISC-V assembly in the C code as well as some Bluetooth demo apps. There is also a basic ESP32-C3-DevKit-LiPo user manual on GitHub.

The ESP32-C3-DevKit-LiPo development board is priced at €6 (which is approximately around $5.80) and can be ordered from the Olimex store. For more information on the specifications of the board, kindly visit the product page at Olimex.