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ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC

espressif.com

41–50 of 112 posts

Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC

#43
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cortex-M. Lots of Bluetooth LE solutions. WiFi getting there - Nordic is working on a solution here as well.

Are the tools and software from Nordic better?

They're good, but you don't have to use them at all. You can use Rust instead! :)

Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC

#44

I was recently looking into using some ESP32s to use on a BLE hardware project I am working on at the moment. Although I do wonder whether wifi would be a better technology to use sometimes. The only thing I remember seeing is that wifi technology uses much more power. From TFA it looks like WiFi 6 uses less power, is this true? Anyone experienced have any suggestions whether BLE or WiFi would be better for streaming…

One downside of using wifi if that devices like phones really don't like network connections that don't route to the internet. You sometimes have to fight them to stop the phone "helpfully" falling back to 4G or popping up all sorts of warnings about degraded networking to the user. [edit]: This is assuming you are connecting directly to the device of course. Connecting the ESP32 to your existing wifi is well support…

Any idea how this works? Are they trying to connect to a particular address?

Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC

#45
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One downside of using wifi if that devices like phones really don't like network connections that don't route to the internet. You sometimes have to fight them to stop the phone "helpfully" falling back to 4G or popping up all sorts of warnings about degraded networking to the user. [edit]: This is assuming you are connecting directly to the device of course. Connecting the ESP32 to your existing wifi is well support…

I have tried fighting this a couple of times but lost every time. Do you know a solution to make my Android phone keep the connection to a wifi without internet connection?

I lack a solution but would like to commiserate. We had some config errors on one of our VLANs, where DNS want reachable. The phones helpfully would just say no internet access and then bounce to 4g without any other sorry of error. What I would give to be able to just SSH into all these consumer services and just grep through the logs.

Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC

#46
post #42

I wonder what Risc-V would bring them, other than some de-risking vs potential trade blockages for ARM as Huawei experienced. Would not having to pay royalties to ARM give this chip a cost advantage? By how much?

They were not using ARM, but Tensilica chips with Xtensa instruction set - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensilica#Xtensa_instruction_s...

Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC

#47

Why didn't they pack more ram on this? 400K is a bit tight, we often hit the ceiling with the ESP32's 512K of internal RAM. Does anyone know if they support SPI-connected external RAM on this? It has been a lifesaver on the ESP32, especially since WROVER-E fixed most of the long standing bugs that were plaguing the earlier revisions. It is slow as hell, but having 4MB (+4MB high memory) of connected RAM on a microcon…

If you happy to answer - what are you doing with them?

Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC

#48
post #38

I really wish Thread mesh networking would become standard on new Wi-Fi routers. Google Nest has hardware support for it, but not sure if it's enabled yet. I think Thread is a much better fit for IP connectivity for IoT devices. Nordic Semiconductor nRF SoCs can do Bluetooth LE and Thread on the same radio at the same time, so should be very cost effective. I'd gladly replace all my Zigbee devices with Thread ones if…

If Wi-Fi routers implemented 802.15.4 we should be able to run 6LoWPAN + Thread/CHIP etc or Zigbee on the same hardware.

Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC

#49
post #46
post #42

I wonder what Risc-V would bring them, other than some de-risking vs potential trade blockages for ARM as Huawei experienced. Would not having to pay royalties to ARM give this chip a cost advantage? By how much?

They were not using ARM, but Tensilica chips with Xtensa instruction set - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensilica#Xtensa_instruction_s...

The -C3, -C6 line is RISC V

Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC

#50

Why didn't they pack more ram on this? 400K is a bit tight, we often hit the ceiling with the ESP32's 512K of internal RAM. Does anyone know if they support SPI-connected external RAM on this? It has been a lifesaver on the ESP32, especially since WROVER-E fixed most of the long standing bugs that were plaguing the earlier revisions. It is slow as hell, but having 4MB (+4MB high memory) of connected RAM on a microcon…

If you happy to answer - what are you doing with them?

Well unlike the Atmel chips, it is -- like it's predecessor the ESP8266 -- a totally internet focused MCU. So with TLS and HTTP requests, and receiving streams and WebSockets and whatever else, it's not hard to imagine what to do with it. More is better. For example I have one ESP32 setup with 8 megs of PSRAM that does a full scan of a currency exchange every 15 seconds. Loads all the data into RAM, which I can subsequently process. Run LED displays on after, trigger other events etc. It's pretty cool!

It's certainly alot more direct to implement than booting up Armbian on a PI, and then starting Node, and then....

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