ESP32-C3-DevKitM

Overview

ESP32-C3-DevKitM is an entry-level development board based on ESP32-C3-MINI-1, a module named for its small size. This board integrates complete Wi-Fi and Bluetooth® Low Energy functions. For more information, check ESP32-C3-DevKitM [1].

Hardware

ESP32-C3 is a single-core Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5 (LE) microcontroller SoC, based on the open-source RISC-V architecture. It strikes the right balance of power, I/O capabilities and security, thus offering the optimal cost-effective solution for connected devices. The availability of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5 (LE) connectivity not only makes the device configuration easy, but it also facilitates a variety of use-cases based on dual connectivity.

The features include the following:

  • 32-bit core RISC-V microcontroller with a maximum clock speed of 160 MHz

  • 400 KB of internal RAM

  • 802.11b/g/n/e/i

  • A Bluetooth LE subsystem that supports features of Bluetooth 5 and Bluetooth Mesh

  • Various peripherals:

    • 12-bit ADC with up to 6 channels

    • TWAI compatible with CAN bus 2.0

    • Temperature sensor

    • 3x SPI

    • 1x I2S

    • 1x I2C

    • 2x UART

    • LED PWM with up to 6 channels

  • Cryptographic hardware acceleration (RNG, ECC, RSA, SHA-2, AES)

For more information, check the datasheet at ESP32-C3 Datasheet [2] or the technical reference manual at ESP32-C3 Technical Reference Manual [3].

Supported Features

Current Zephyr’s ESP32-C3-Devkitm board supports the following features:

Interface

Controller

Driver/Component

UART

on-chip

serial port

GPIO

on-chip

gpio

PINMUX

on-chip

pinmux

USB-JTAG

on-chip

hardware interface

SPI Master

on-chip

spi

Timers

on-chip

counter

Watchdog

on-chip

watchdog

TRNG

on-chip

entropy

LEDC

on-chip

pwm

SPI DMA

on-chip

spi

TWAI

on-chip

can

USB-CDC

on-chip

serial

ADC

on-chip

adc

Wi-Fi

on-chip

Bluetooth

on-chip

System requirements

Prerequisites

Espressif HAL requires WiFi and Bluetooth binary blobs in order work. Run the command below to retrieve those files.

west blobs fetch hal_espressif

Note

It is recommended running the command above after west update.

Building & Flashing

Simple boot

The board could be loaded using the single binary image, without 2nd stage bootloader. It is the default option when building the application without additional configuration.

Note

Simple boot does not provide any security features nor OTA updates.

MCUboot bootloader

User may choose to use MCUboot bootloader instead. In that case the bootloader must be built (and flashed) at least once.

There are two options to be used when building an application:

  1. Sysbuild

  2. Manual build

Note

User can select the MCUboot bootloader by adding the following line to the board default configuration file.

CONFIG_BOOTLOADER_MCUBOOT=y

Sysbuild

The sysbuild makes possible to build and flash all necessary images needed to bootstrap the board with the ESP32 SoC.

To build the sample application using sysbuild use the command:

west build -b esp32c3_devkitm --sysbuild samples/hello_world

By default, the ESP32 sysbuild creates bootloader (MCUboot) and application images. But it can be configured to create other kind of images.

Build directory structure created by sysbuild is different from traditional Zephyr build. Output is structured by the domain subdirectories:

build/
├── hello_world
│   └── zephyr
│       ├── zephyr.elf
│       └── zephyr.bin
├── mcuboot
│    └── zephyr
│       ├── zephyr.elf
│       └── zephyr.bin
└── domains.yaml

Note

With --sysbuild option the bootloader will be re-build and re-flash every time the pristine build is used.

For more information about the system build please read the Sysbuild (System build) documentation.

Manual build

During the development cycle, it is intended to build & flash as quickly possible. For that reason, images can be built one at a time using traditional build.

The instructions following are relevant for both manual build and sysbuild. The only difference is the structure of the build directory.

Note

Remember that bootloader (MCUboot) needs to be flash at least once.

Build and flash applications as usual (see Building an Application and Run an Application for more details).

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b esp32c3_devkitm samples/hello_world

The usual flash target will work with the esp32c3_devkitm board configuration. Here is an example for the Hello World application.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b esp32c3_devkitm samples/hello_world
west flash

Open the serial monitor using the following command:

west espressif monitor

After the board has automatically reset and booted, you should see the following message in the monitor:

***** Booting Zephyr OS vx.x.x-xxx-gxxxxxxxxxxxx *****
Hello World! esp32c3_devkitm

Debugging

As with much custom hardware, the ESP32-C3 modules require patches to OpenOCD that are not upstreamed yet. Espressif maintains their own fork of the project. The custom OpenOCD can be obtained at OpenOCD ESP32 [4].

The Zephyr SDK uses a bundled version of OpenOCD by default. You can overwrite that behavior by adding the -DOPENOCD=<path/to/bin/openocd> -DOPENOCD_DEFAULT_PATH=<path/to/openocd/share/openocd/scripts> parameter when building.

Here is an example for building the Hello World application.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b esp32c3_devkitm samples/hello_world -- -DOPENOCD=<path/to/bin/openocd> -DOPENOCD_DEFAULT_PATH=<path/to/openocd/share/openocd/scripts>
west flash

You can debug an application in the usual way. Here is an example for the Hello World application.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b esp32c3_devkitm samples/hello_world
west debug

References