The ESP32-C3 from Espressif has been eagerly awaited. It has just one core humming away at its heart instead of the usual two cores in ESP32-based controllers. This core, however, uses the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture which competes with ARM-based controllers widely used for IoT applications. I recently took a look at the ESP32-C3 and the ESP32-C3-DevKitC-02 to see how it performed in the lab. Let’s review what I learned.