Adafruit's QT Py ESP32-C3, Its First RISC-V Dev Board, Begins Rolling Off the Production Line
Tiny board with a 160MHz RISC-V core, 400kB of SRAM, 4MB flash, Wi-Fi, and BLE 5.0 to hit the Adafruit store soon.
Adafruit has confirmed that its QT Py ESP32-C3, the company's first development board built around the free and open source RISC-V instruction set architecture, is coming soon — and at under $10.
"This is going to be our first RISC-V based dev board," explains Adafruit's Phillip Torrone of the latest entry in the diminutive QT Py family of boards, "and isn't that something to celebrate? It's a QT Py based on the ESP32-C3 which is a Wi-Fi + BLE chipset with RISC-V instead of [the] Tensilica core."
Espressif announced the ESP32-C3 at the tail end of 2020 as a drop-in pin-compatible replacement for the popular ESP8266 microcontroller. At its heart is a 32-bit single-core microcontroller, built atop the free and open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture, running at up to 160MHz alongside 400kB of static RAM (SRAM) and radios for 2.4GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 5.0.
"This chip is a little new," Torrone writes, "but it does seem to have fairly good Arduino support, we're able to do Wi-Fi tests and thankfully someone sent us a patch for NeoPixels so that's glowing as well. This chip has a built in USB-to-Serial converter (not native USB!) so there's a ROM bootloader, great for beginners because its not brickable."
Those looking to pick the board up should be aware of its limitations, however: Without native USB, the new QT Py can't act as a keyboard or disk drive; there's no digital-to-analog converter (DAC); and no native support for capacitive touch sensing.
The first QT Py ESP32-C3 boards, which include 4MB of flash storage, have begun to roll off Adafruit's production line; interested parties can sign up to be notified when the boards go on sale on the Adafruit store, where they will launch at $9.95 in the near future.