from Hacker News

Espressif's ESP32-C5 Is Now in Mass Production

by radeeyate on 4/30/25, 10:15 PM with 183 comments

  • by bri3d on 4/30/25, 11:20 PM

    Announced 2+ years ago (almost 3, now that I look: https://www.espressif.com/en/news/ESP32-C5 ) and sampling 1+ year ago, good to see it finally come. 5GHz support is increasingly important.
  • by purpleidea on 5/1/25, 5:56 AM

    The big anti-feature is that developers can block users from flashing the chips.

    Yes, there's a security angle, but if I have the chip in my hands, I should be able to flip some pin to reprogram the chip and prevent all the e-waste.

  • by Scene_Cast2 on 5/1/25, 12:09 AM

    I wonder if the power consumption is any better. An nRF runs circles around any existing ESP32 variants in terms of power.
  • by stavros on 4/30/25, 11:19 PM

    This is looking pretty great, I've really wanted a MCU with Zigbee on it, for the various little battery-operated devices I've wanted to make. However, with Espressif's lineup, I've really lost track of what does what, lately.

    Does anyone know of a good comparison resource?

  • by snvzz on 4/30/25, 11:14 PM

    This microcontroller, like all microcontrollers Espressif released in the last few years, uses RISC-V as the ISA.
  • by shoelessone on 4/30/25, 11:57 PM

    Any guesses as to when a hobbyist might be able to buy the module without the dev board? Their aliexpress store didn't have them as far as I can tell, I assume they are prioritizing dev boards for the moment unless you're a big enough company to actually talk directly with Espressif.
  • by platevoltage on 4/30/25, 11:22 PM

    Let's hope they will finally enable the USB Host HID Class Driver to support non-boot protocol devices this go around.
  • by londons_explore on 5/1/25, 2:27 AM

    Is the 10k unit price public?
  • by winrid on 5/1/25, 4:21 AM

    Would an esp32 be the best soc for LoRa? I don't need WiFi or BT, which I know I can turn off to save power. Contemplating trying STM32 instead, don't have experience programming it yet.
  • by antoniuschan99 on 5/1/25, 3:00 AM

    Hopefully p4 will be released soon too!
  • by varispeed on 5/1/25, 3:55 PM

    I wish there was something more powerful than STM32H7 or RT1070 available. It would be awesome to be able to compute complex algorithms in real time.
  • by botanical on 5/1/25, 3:42 PM

    I wanted a board with Zigbee support but $21 ($16 plus $5 shipping) is quite expensive for a single board.
  • by TechDebtDevin on 5/1/25, 2:53 PM

    Too bad after tariffs, this little guy would have cost $10-15 and now will probably be $50 +

    I feel like the Trump admin is going to have to make a carve out for the esp32 or certain Espressif products. So many IOT businesses going to go out of business if these MCs baloon in price.

  • by Tepix on 5/1/25, 8:41 AM

    Bought a bunch of ESP32-C3 Supermini boards for 1.05€ each. Incredible value.
  • by colechristensen on 4/30/25, 11:21 PM

    They link to a $15 developer board on Aliexpress (much the same as the rest of the ESP developer boards floating around for years) which is now inflated to $35 with tax, shipping, and tariff.

    My impulse purchase has been tempered with "eh, do I really need it?"

  • by gitroom on 5/1/25, 12:06 PM

    Honestly, shipping stuff direct from China and paying more for it here always trips me out, but it's kinda the norm now. You think it'll get easier to actually repair or reprogram stuff or are we just stuck tossing hardware once it's locked down?
  • by mindslight on 5/1/25, 12:24 AM

    $126/ea in quantity after tariffs.

    Why do I have this sickening feeling that in a few years anyone doing anything with hardware is going to be ordering everything direct from China, like we're some kind of undeveloped client state?

  • by winkywooster on 4/30/25, 11:37 PM

    how much memory does the dev kit have? it’s not clear after following links off that article.
  • by phkahler on 5/1/25, 12:04 AM

    Does it have floating point hardware?

    Does it have CAN?

    How does the core compare to their old ones?

    I'm a little disappointed that it only has one core even though I haven't used the second one on the older chips yet.

  • by kovac on 4/30/25, 11:21 PM

    If anyone from Espressif seeing this, I love your MCUs. But can you please improve the ESP-IDF so that it's usable on BSD systems. The Linuxisms baked into its build system is unnecessary.

    I think moving from Make in the old version of IDF to CMake was a mistake.

  • by janis1234 on 5/1/25, 12:05 AM

    from my understanding RISC-V chips are slower and more expensive and less optimized compilers, so why in the world would an end user use one?