Ron Dobson is working on some electronic jewelry and has decided to use the ESP32-C3 chip.

Part of the rationale is that is a member of the Espressif family of MCUs and I’m quite familiar with Espressif’s development platform.

The ESP32-C3 is a RISC-V based chip but otherwise has quite a lot in common with the Xtensa based chips (S3, etc) in terms of peripheral support. According to Adafruit it is supposed to have good low-power characteristics at less than 500uA in sleep modes.

The jewelry I’m working on will have LED displays of various kinds as well as some I2C and I2S comms but it is the processor’s own low-power characteristics that I’m trying to gauge right now. The scope of things I’d like to understand include:

• Base ESP32 C3 power usage with no peripherals active (including no BLE or WiFi) but full CPU operation at normal operating frequency
• Effect of reducing operating frequency (the lowest I think worth trying is 10MHz)
• Light-sleep mode power usage
• Deep-sleep mode power usage
• Anything else that might be interesting to know as investigations progress

Check out the results of Rob’s testing in the post here.