Adafruit has confirmed that its QT Py ESP32-C3, the company’s first development board built around the free and open source RISC-V instruction set architecture, is coming soon — and at under $10.
“This is going to be our first RISC-V based dev board,” explains Adafruit’s Phillip Torrone of the latest entry in the diminutive QT Py family of boards, “and isn’t that something to celebrate? It’s a QT Py based on the ESP32-C3 which is a Wi-Fi + BLE chipset with RISC-V instead of [the] Tensilica core.”
Espressif announced the ESP32-C3 at the tail end of 2020 as a drop-in pin-compatible replacement for the popular ESP8266 microcontroller. At its heart is a 32-bit single-core microcontroller, built atop the free and open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture, running at up to 160MHz alongside 400kB of static RAM (SRAM) and radios for 2.4GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 5.0.