New ESP32-C3-DevKit-LiPo RISC-V Development Board from Olimex is Available for Less Than $6

 This board has a tonne of functionality, including a USB Type-C connection, JTAG debugging, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and battery management.

ESP32-C3 DEVKIT-Lipo Board

The ESP32-C3-DevKit-Lipo is a new tiny development board by Bulgarian open-source hardware expert Olimex based on the RISC-V Espressif ESP32-C3.

Olimex's ESP32-C3-DevKit-Lipo is an "entry-level RISC-V board" with impressive 15 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins, 2.4GHz 802.11/b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5 connectivity with an on-board antenna and an integrated lithium-polymer battery management system with status LED. It is designed to cram in features without driving up the price.

The Espressif ESP32-C3 module is on one end of the breadboard-friendly arrangement, while a USB Type-C connector with power and data is on the other. A single low-power RISC-V CPU core, 400 kB of static RAM (SRAM), 384 kB of ROM, 8 kB of extra SRAM in the real-time clock (RTC), and 4 MB of embedded flash storage are all included in the ESP32-C3 system-on-chip.

Olimex did not design the ESP32-C3-DevKit-Lipo board to incorporate Espressif components: In order to enable previously inaccessible USB On-The-Go (OTG) capabilities, the business respun its earlier ESP32-S2-DevKit-Lipo, a direct ancestor to the present-day ESP32-C3 version, two years ago. At the same time, its ESP32-ADF board focused on audio applications.

The new board, which can be ordered on the Olimex website for about €6 (around $5.90), is now supported by the Arduino IDE, PlatfomIO, and Espressif's own ESP-IDF programming environment. As always, a battery is not included in the pricing. The CERN Open Hardware License Version 2 highly common variation is used to licence the board's KiCad design files and Gerber production files in the project's GitHub repository.