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Adafruit has confirmed that its QT Py ESP32-C3, the corporate’s first improvement board constructed across the free and open supply RISC-V instruction set structure, is coming quickly — and at beneath $10.
“That is going to be our first RISC-V based mostly dev board,” explains Adafruit’s Phillip Torrone of the most recent entry within the diminutive QT Py household of boards, “and is not that one thing to rejoice? It is a QT Py based mostly on the ESP32-C3 which is a Wi-Fi + BLE chipset with RISC-V as an alternative of [the] Tensilica core.”
Espressif introduced the ESP32-C3 on the tail finish of 2020 as a drop-in pin-compatible alternative for the favored ESP8266 microcontroller. At its coronary heart is a 32-bit single-core microcontroller, constructed atop the free and open-source RISC-V instruction set structure, working at as much as 160MHz alongside 400kB of static RAM (SRAM) and radios for two.4GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Vitality (BLE) 5.0.
“This chip is a bit new,” Torrone writes, “but it surely does appear to have pretty good Arduino help, we’re in a position to do Wi-Fi assessments and fortunately somebody despatched us a patch for NeoPixels in order that’s glowing as effectively. This chip has a inbuilt USB-to-Serial converter (not native USB!) so there is a ROM bootloader, nice for newcomers as a result of its not brickable.”
These trying to choose the board up ought to concentrate on its limitations, nevertheless: With out native USB, the brand new QT Py cannot act as a keyboard or disk drive; there isn’t any digital-to-analog converter (DAC); and no native help for capacitive contact sensing.
The primary QT Py ESP32-C3 boards, which embody 4MB of flash storage, have begun to roll off Adafruit’s manufacturing line; events can signal as much as be notified when the boards go on sale on the Adafruit retailer, the place they are going to launch at $9.95 within the close to future.
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