Espressif recently announced, after a very lengthy delay, that their RISC-V based ESP32-C5 chip is being mass-produced. This chip combines dual-band WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5 LE, and 802.15.4 connectivity for protocols like Zigbee and Thread. It’s similar to the existing ESP32-C6, except it has a faster CPU clock, supports dual-band WiFi, and has a bit more SRAM. It’s low-power co-processor (which many forget exists on the RISC-V ESP32 chips) also runs at double the clock speed compared to the C6. This little development board is a great way to get up and running quickly with the new chip!
With dual USB-C connectors (one for UART and programming, the other connected directly to the C5’s USB pins), on-board RGB LED, and even a current measurement test jumper, it packs quite a bit into a small package. However, because the official ESP-IDF libraries only added support for the C5 a couple of months ago, there isn’t (yet) an Arduino bootloader or Micro/CircuitPython runtime. These will likely be coming along very soon, but as of this writing using ESP-IDF is the only way to get up and running.
There is a lot of excellent documentation for using ESP-IDF, and there are already a multitude of video and text tutorials for getting started with the ESP32-C5. That being said, if you’re not a strong C programmer, you might want to wait for the Arduino or Python firmware to become available! Keep an eye out as more projects pop up using this chip – I think we’ll start to see some pretty cool things being done with a chip this small an inexpensive that supports true dual-band WiFi 6!
source https://blog.tindie.com/2025/08/play-with-the-esp32-c5-finally/
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