SparkFun has launched a brand new entry in its Professional Micro growth board household, and this time it is housing the Espressif ESP32-C3 RISC-V microcontroller — with breadboard and surface-mount-compatible pin headers and a Qwiic connector for solder-free initiatives.
“The latest Professional Micro growth board to hitch our solid of characters […] options the strong ESP32-C3 from Espressif,” SparkFun’s Chris McCarty writes of the corporate’s newest growth board design. “That is an extremely quick, single-core RISC-V wi-fi growth platform that may match into most, if not all, venture areas, particularly when measurement and weight are a priority.”
The Espressif ESP32-C3 on the coronary heart of SparkFun’s newest Professional Micro was introduced again in November 2020, following a leak, as the corporate’s first microcontroller to characteristic a main processor core constructed on the free and open supply RISC-V instruction set structure — the success of which might lead the corporate to maneuver solely to RISC-V and away from its earlier proprietary core IP.
On the compact SparkFun Professional Micro, the ESP32-C3 — within the type of an ESP32-C3-MINI-1 module — clocks its single 32-bit processor core in at as much as 160MHz, options 400kB of static RAM (SRAM) of which 16kB is used as cache, an extra 8kB of SRAM within the real-time clock (RTC), and 384kB of on-die ROM plus 4MB on-package flash.
As you’d anticipate from an ESP32, there’s wi-fi connectivity: single-band IEEE 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi plus Bluetooth 5 Low Power (BLE) with Bluetooth Mesh help, the radios for each of which share a single on-board antenna. The module’s varied options are then introduced out to castellated pin headers within the Professional Micro format, with 22 user-accessible general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) pins and SPI, UART, I2C, I2S buses, a TWAI controller appropriate with CAN 2.0, and pulse-width modulation (PWM) plus analog to digital converter (ADC) pins.
The board consists of unpopulated 0.1″ pin headers and a vertically-oriented Qwiic socket. (📷: SparkFun)
“The Professional Micro ESP32-C3 faucets into the ability of Espressif’s open supply ESP-IDF,” McCarty says of the board’s software program help, “a sturdy ecosystem brimming with libraries, instruments, and a supportive neighborhood. Plus, you may leverage the acquainted Arduino IDE for a clean growth expertise.”
The SparkFun Professional Micro is now in the stores on the corporate retailer, priced at $9.95 earlier than quantity reductions.