Espressif's ESP32-C5 Is Now in Mass Production
71 comments
·April 30, 2025Scene_Cast2
I wonder if the power consumption is any better. An nRF runs circles around any existing ESP32 variants in terms of power.
KennyBlanken
Not to mention the horrific peak power draw. It took people a while to figure out that the things need a fair bit of close-by capacitance on the power rail or they crash.
stavros
How much capacitance? I built my own sensors based on ESP8266 and they've been flaky, and I wonder whether that's the issue.
wwarren
Coming out of deep sleep and Wifi coming back up, I’ve seen upwards of 600mA
XorNot
220uf would be the minimum. I've had modules get stuck in a boot loop when they have less then 120uf (inferred by repairing switch modules with bad capacitors).
stavros
This is looking pretty great, I've really wanted a MCU with Zigbee on it, for the various little battery-operated devices I've wanted to make. However, with Espressif's lineup, I've really lost track of what does what, lately.
Does anyone know of a good comparison resource?
baby_souffle
https://products.espressif.com/#/product-comparison
This is a little bit more interactive and detail-oriented. I think they also have flashy onesheet PDFs that are more marketing oriented.
e-max
The flashy PDF is here https://products.espressif.com/static/Espressif%20SoC%20Prod... a one-pager comparing all models.
throwup238
According to that pdf the ESP32-C5 does have Zigbee.
dx4100
The ESP32-C6 has a Zigbee radio. I have 6 myself -- they're great.
teruakohatu
Does the Zigbee work well/as expected? Does it have lower power draw when doing Zigbee vs. wifi?
shoelessone
Any guesses as to when a hobbyist might be able to buy the module without the dev board? Their aliexpress store didn't have them as far as I can tell, I assume they are prioritizing dev boards for the moment unless you're a big enough company to actually talk directly with Espressif.
self
It's on their store at https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008790788462.html
teraflop
That's a dev board.
platevoltage
Let's hope they will finally enable the USB Host HID Class Driver to support non-boot protocol devices this go around.
shoelessone
Any chance you could explain this to somebody who is just learning about HID and has run this example: https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf/tree/master/examples/pe... ? "non-boot protocol" I'm guessing is the key here? I don't have a super deep understanding of HID or what the "boot-protocol" refers to.
thequux
The USB HID protocol is designed to support basically any device that regularly reports a set of values; those values can represent which keys are pressed, how a mouse has moved, how a joystick is positioned, etc. Now, different devices have different things that they support: joysticks have varying numbers of axes, mice have different sets of buttons, some keyboards have dials on them, etc. So, there's no single format for a report that simultaneously efficiently uses bandwidth and supports all the things a human interface device might do. To solve this, the HID protocol specifies that the host can request a "report descriptor" that specifies the format and meaning of the status reports. This is great for complex devices running a full OS; there's plenty of memory and processing power to handle those varying formats. However, these HID devices needed to also work in very limited environments: a real mode BIOS, microcontroller, etc. So, for certain classes of device such as keyboards and mice, there is a standard but limited report format called the "boot protocol". IIRC, the keyboard version has space to list 6 keys that are pressed simultaneously (plus modifiers), all of which must be from the same table of keys in the spec, and the mouse has an dX and dY field plus a bitfield for up to 8 buttons (four of which are the various ways you can scroll). To implement a more complex device, you'd want to be able to specify your own report format, which the ESP driver doesn't seem to allow you to do.
platevoltage
I'll give you my anecdote. I'm building a device that reads the input of a USB game controller. In my case, it's a Sim Steering Wheel. I ended up needing to incorporate a MAX3421e USB Host chip to read the HID input, because the ESP firmware doesn't have this implemented. Hardware wise, all ESP32 chips with hardware USB could do this, but they haven't prioritized it in software. Some keyboards and Mice use a protocol called "boot protocol", and you can get those to work. It's not very common in game controllers though.
londons_explore
Is the 10k unit price public?
kovac
If anyone from Espressif seeing this, I love your MCUs. But can you please improve the ESP-IDF so that it's usable on BSD systems. The Linuxisms baked into its build system is unnecessary.
I think moving from Make in the old version of IDF to CMake was a mistake.
PedroBatista
Love it or hate it, CMake is more or less the de facto build system for C/C++
And just like any build system for everything language/stack, there is a small group of hardcore "enthusiasts" who create and push their true build tech to rule them all and then there is the large majority of people who have to deal with it and just want to build the damn thing.
actinium226
Hate it, definitely hate it.
I mean, I use it, but I'm not very happy about it.
sho_hn
It should generally be easier to make a CMake buildsystem work well on the BSDs than hand-cobbled Makefiles, in terms of opportunities to introduce Linuxisms.
winkywooster
how much memory does the dev kit have? it’s not clear after following links off that article.
self
This image says 384 KB of RAM: https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-dev-kits/en/latest/e...
It also says 320 KB of ROM, which seems low. Judging from the product name (DevKitC-1-N8R4) and their other products, it has 8 MB of flash.
freeqaz
If it's like the other ESP32s with PSRAM support then 2-8MB most likely. IIRC it is addressed in the same way as the NAND, so the more RAM the less NAND you can have.
Maybe not applicable for this new one, but that's my understanding for the S3/C5 models. (something like 16mb NAND and 8mb PSRAM)
mzakharo1
onboard memory is limited. PSRAM is available
snvzz
This microcontroller, like all microcontrollers Espressif released in the last few years, uses RISC-V as the ISA.
platevoltage
I believe the C series is RISC-V, not the S series.
bobmcnamara
Xtensa is a dead end, they said so on ESP32.com when someone pointed out the FPU ABI bottleneck
platevoltage
I'm sure you're right. The current s3 chip is based on Xtensa, but it was released in 2020, so I guess the OP's statement is correct.
snvzz
Espressif made a decisive shift to RISC-V[0], effectively abandoning Tensilica.
ESP32-S3 was, AIUI, their last non RISC-V chip.
It was announced in 2020 and released in 2022.
0. https://www.hackster.io/news/espressif-s-teo-swee-ann-confir...
colechristensen
From the link
>Espressif Systems (SSE: 688018.SH) announced ESP32-C5, the industry’s first RISC-V SoC that supports 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz dual-band Wi-Fi 6, along with Bluetooth 5 (LE) and IEEE 802.15.4 (Zigbee, Thread) connectivity. Today, we are glad to announce that ESP32-C5 is now in mass production.
hughc
This wording is ambiguous- it's the first to support 5GHz, but it's not their first RISC-V core.
osrec
Genuine question: is that a good or bad thing?
bobmcnamara
It's a mix.
Better compiler support for RISC-V, but everything I've seen from them is a much shorter pipeline than the older Xtensa cores, so flash cache misses hit it harder.
Both RISC-V and Xtensa suffer from the lack of an ALU carry bit for the purposes of improving pipelining. But for these small cores it means 64-bit integer math usually takes a few more cycles than a Cortex-M Arm chip
viraptor
But that also depends on what you use it for. If you're after the wifi and IO and other nice things for a mostly idle device - the pipeline is almost irrelevant. Esphome can run on older versions just fine too. On the other hand if you're doing something very optimised and need tight timing around interrupts to drive external hardware - it may matter a lot.
So... depends on the project.
connicpu
It's a big plus if you want to write code for it in something like Rust. LLVM support for the architecture they used on their older chips (xtensa) for a very long time required compiling a fork of LLVM and rustc in order to target the chips. It may still, I didn't keep up with the effort to upstream that target. RISC-V is an open architecture that has a lot of people excited so compiler support for it is very good. Though as far as why Espressif is using it, it feels likely they would use it because it means they don't have to pay anyone any royalties for the ISA.
baby_souffle
Unless you're a shareholder of arm, hard to see how it's a bad thing.
bobmcnamara
The other core they've used is Xtensa
phkahler
Does it have floating point hardware?
Does it have CAN?
How does the core compare to their old ones?
I'm a little disappointed that it only has one core even though I haven't used the second one on the older chips yet.
all2
https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-dev-kits/en/latest/e...
Pinout for the dev board.
colechristensen
They link to a $15 developer board on Aliexpress (much the same as the rest of the ESP developer boards floating around for years) which is now inflated to $35 with tax, shipping, and tariff.
My impulse purchase has been tempered with "eh, do I really need it?"
ryukoposting
Even $15 is on the high end for Espressif dev boards. Not that it's saying much.
If all you need is Zigbee/BLE and a few IO pins, an nRF52840 dongle is still $10 on DigiKey.
colechristensen
These are ones actually made by Espressif and limit is one per person (presumably supply issues as they ramp up mass production), certainly there will be dozens of clones soon.
davb
Fortunately it’s only £16.40 with VAT and shipping to the UK. Approx $21.85. Comparable to the £9 M5Stack AtomS3 Lite (ESP32-S3) I picked up from Pi Hut recently.
turnsout
This should help all the US-based RISC-V microcontroller companies though, right? /s
orthecreedence
Finally all the mom and pop chip fabs running out of a garage get a fighting chance.
dx4100
Can't wait to buy from some west coast hipster with a garage fab now that it's economically viable. /s
Alupis
The really criminal thing is it only costs $8.43 to mail that thing from China to your house in the USA... it likely would cost you more to mail that same item to yourself from yourself.
That alone puts US-based sellers at a mega disadvantage compared to cheap Chinese goods - and it's not a good thing.
Aurornis
Most of my Aliexpress electronics orders are shipped to a local US Aliexpress distribution center which then mails them locally. These come in small padded envelopes which are not expensive to ship.
colechristensen
>The really criminal thing is it only costs $8.43 to mail that thing from China to your house in the USA... it likely would cost you more to mail that same item to yourself from yourself.
These things are tiny and very cheap to ship. I could probably pack 40 of them into a USPS flat rate box shipped anywhere in the US for $9.30.
This was a decent argument when you could get things shipped from China for $0.50, but not now or in this case.
Announced 2+ years ago (almost 3, now that I look: https://www.espressif.com/en/news/ESP32-C5 ) and sampling 1+ year ago, good to see it finally come. 5GHz support is increasingly important.