Over the past year, I have been using the esp32 as my go-to Arduino at heart micro-controller. It has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, it’s power-efficient, and it costs less than $5. In my quest to find something more robust, I found the esp32-c3. The esp32-c3 is one of the new chips in the ever-growing esp32 family. While it was not more powerful, it did introduce some new ideas from espressif that I am excited to see more of as they continue to expand the esp32 family further.

I bought the 3 versions from AliExpress. One of the hardest things to understand was what all the versions meant. An excerpt from the listing says

"ESP-C3-32S module acquiesce in using the built-in 4MByte Flash, meanwhile support
external Flash version"

Trying to find more about the different variants from Ai-Thinker using some of their published pdfs (https://docs.ai-thinker.com/_media/esp32/docs/esp-c3-12f_specification.pdf) render dead-ends as most of their pdfs are unreachable.

I have gotten a download of the pdf and if you are looking to see the spec sheet please download below.

From what I have read online this is mostly around the types of pin-outs. So to investigate further I flipped them around and found that this was the case. One of the most noticeable things missing is the ability to have a serial pinout (SPI) on the other devkits.

The following table is from https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/latest/esp32c3/hw-reference/chip-series-comparison.html

While for the most part, this looks like a less feature-filled esp32 compared with the other variants, Hackaday has an article talking about the introduction of the chip when it was first released and said,

“Our takeaway: the ESP32-C3 is going to replace the ESP8266 in our projects, but it won’t replace the ESP32 which simply has more of everything when we need it.”

I have shared the same sentiment around this chip as I have really enjoyed working with the esp32 in general, this lacks some of the “oomph” of being able to work with more than just one core and some extra internal ROM memory. Based on my own observations, and this was called out in the article, it seems this is a way to get manufacturers with lower margins to stop using esp8266 and instead start using the esp32 family. My understanding is that the encryption is more aligned with the esp8266 and as such hardware manufacturers could not use the esp32 in their products.

Takeaway

While the power usage is marginally better than the esp32 but contains Bluetooth 5 I am going to keep using this as a way to test out some ideas I have with https://github.com/project-chip/connectedhomeip#readme. For other projects, I am going to stick with the esp32 dual-core. My hope is that the esp32-c6 is going to really push the envelope and make me replace my current usages as it introduces Wi-Fi 6 and hopefully Bluetooth 5.2 (The official release document does not specify which variant of Bluetooth 5) If you are going to buy the esp32-c3 look for the 32s variant as that is the one that seems most versatile.