March 30, 2022

The ESP32-C3 DevKitC-02

I bought 4 of these from AliExpress. Price was just under $5 each including shipping. They have been sitting around for 3 months, and today was the day to cut open a bag and see what we have. This is my first experience with the RISC-V architecture. I purchased an ESP32-C3-DevKitC-02 from Adafruit for $10 because that was affordable and seemed like an easy way to take a look at RISC-V.

Then I ordered 4 of what look like the same thing on AliExpress. I paid $3.50 each, the entire order came to $19.07, so these cost me $5 each.

The seller offers a number of different variants, just to confuse the buyer. What I have is a "ESP-C3-32S-Kit(4M)". They offer 12F, 13, 13U, 01M as well as 32S, each typically in both 2M and 4M versions. I don't have a clue yet what this is all about and I just picked the option with the biggest number.

Note that my board is not the "official" Espressif board. Mine has a CH340 chip in lieu of a CP2102 and components in somewhat different places.

Fire it up!!

I find a micro USB cable and plug it in. A really bright white LED comes on, I suppose to indicate power. My log file shows: 

2022-06-13T13:42:19.661109-07:00 trona kernel: usb 3-2: new full-speed USB device number 3 using xhci_hcd
2022-06-13T13:42:19.853069-07:00 trona kernel: usb 3-2: New USB device found, idVendor=1a86, idProduct=7523, bcdDevice=81.32
2022-06-13T13:42:19.853537-07:00 trona kernel: usb 3-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=0, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
2022-06-13T13:42:19.853868-07:00 trona kernel: usb 3-2: Product: USB Serial
2022-06-13T13:42:19.879036-07:00 trona kernel: usbcore: registered new interface driver ch341
2022-06-13T13:42:19.879138-07:00 trona kernel: usbserial: USB Serial support registered for ch341-uart
2022-06-13T13:42:19.879179-07:00 trona kernel: ch341 3-2:1.0: ch341-uart converter detected
2022-06-13T13:42:19.880035-07:00 trona kernel: usb 3-2: ch341-uart converter now attached to ttyUSB0
So, it makes itself available via the CH340 chip as /dev/ttyUSB0

I try poking at it with an old version of esptool without luck. (It tells me "Unexpected CHIP magic value 0x1b31506f". This version is from May, 2018 (4 years ago) when I was working with the Xtensa esp32 I should try a more recent version.

Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org