The ESP32-C6 is Espressifs first Wi-Fi 6 SoC integrating 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5 (LE) and the 802.15.4 protocol. It brings the goodness you know from the low-cost C3 series and improves it with Zigbee/802.15.4 at 2.4 GHz. That means it could make for great Matter development hardware!

We took our Feather ESP32-S2 and swapped out the ‘S2 for a C6. Plus some re-routing and here’s what we’ve got: a C6 Feather with lots of GPIO, lipoly charging and monitoring with the MAX17048, NeoPixel, I2C Stemma QT port, and a second low-quiescent LDO for disabling the I2C and NeoPixel when we want ultra-low power usage – as low as 17uA in deep sleep.

One thing to watch for is that, like the C3, the C6 does not have a native USB. It does have a ‘built-in’ USB Serial core that can be used for debugging, but it cannot act like a mouse, keyboard, or disk drive. That means if you are running CircuitPython you will need to use WiFi, Bluetooth or WebSerial for transferring files back and forth rather than drag-and-dropping to a drive. Ditto for the bootloader side, this chip cannot run UF2.

Another thing to be aware of is the ESP32-C6 does not have as many GPIO as the ESP32-S2 or ESP32-S3, so A2 is the same GPIO pin as IO6 and A3 is the same pin as IO5. However, this gives it the most compatibility with our existing FeatherWings.

Resources

• Primary Guide