XIAO ESP32C6

Overview

Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32C6 is powered by the highly-integrated ESP32-C6 SoC. It consists of a high-performance (HP) 32-bit RISC-V processor, which can be clocked up to 160 MHz, and a low-power (LP) 32-bit RISC-V processor, which can be clocked up to 20 MHz. It has a 320KB ROM, a 512KB SRAM, and works with external flash. This board integrates complete Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE, Zigbee, and Thread functions. For more information, check Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32C6 [1] .

Hardware

This board is based on the ESP32-C6 with 4MB of flash, integrating 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3 (LE) and the 802.15.4 protocol. It has an USB-C port for programming and debugging, integrated battery charging and an U.FL external antenna connector. It is based on a standard XIAO 14 pin pinout.

Supported Features

The Zephyr xiao_esp32c6 board target supports the following hardware features:

Interface

Controller

Driver/Component

UART

on-chip

serial port

GPIO

on-chip

gpio

PINMUX

on-chip

pinmux

USB-JTAG

on-chip

hardware interface

SPI Master

on-chip

spi

Watchdog

on-chip

watchdog

LEDC

on-chip

pwm

SPI DMA

on-chip

spi

GDMA

on-chip

dma

TRNG

on-chip

entropy

USB-CDC

on-chip

serial

Wi-Fi

on-chip

The board uses a standard XIAO pinout, the default pin mapping is the following:

XIAO ESP32C6 Pinout

XIAO ESP32C6 Pinout

System requirements

Prerequisites

Espressif HAL requires WiFi and Bluetooth binary blobs in order work. Run the command below to retrieve those files.

west blobs fetch hal_espressif

Note

It is recommended running the command above after west update.

Building & Flashing

Simple boot

The board could be loaded using the single binary image, without 2nd stage bootloader. It is the default option when building the application without additional configuration.

Note

Simple boot does not provide any security features nor OTA updates.

MCUboot bootloader

User may choose to use MCUboot bootloader instead. In that case the bootloader must be built (and flashed) at least once.

There are two options to be used when building an application:

  1. Sysbuild

  2. Manual build

Note

User can select the MCUboot bootloader by adding the following line to the board default configuration file.

CONFIG_BOOTLOADER_MCUBOOT=y

Sysbuild

The sysbuild makes possible to build and flash all necessary images needed to bootstrap the board with the EPS32 SoC.

To build the sample application using sysbuild use the command:

west build -b xiao_esp32c6 --sysbuild samples/hello_world

By default, the ESP32 sysbuild creates bootloader (MCUboot) and application images. But it can be configured to create other kind of images.

Build directory structure created by sysbuild is different from traditional Zephyr build. Output is structured by the domain subdirectories:

build/
├── hello_world
│   └── zephyr
│       ├── zephyr.elf
│       └── zephyr.bin
├── mcuboot
│    └── zephyr
│       ├── zephyr.elf
│       └── zephyr.bin
└── domains.yaml

Note

With --sysbuild option the bootloader will be re-build and re-flash every time the pristine build is used.

For more information about the system build please read the Sysbuild (System build) documentation.

Manual build

During the development cycle, it is intended to build & flash as quickly possible. For that reason, images can be built one at a time using traditional build.

The instructions following are relevant for both manual build and sysbuild. The only difference is the structure of the build directory.

Note

Remember that bootloader (MCUboot) needs to be flash at least once.

Build and flash applications as usual (see Building an Application and Run an Application for more details).

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b xiao_esp32c6 samples/hello_world

The usual flash target will work with the xiao_esp32c6 board configuration. Here is an example for the Hello World application.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b xiao_esp32c6 samples/hello_world
west flash

Since the Zephyr console is by default on the usb_serial device, we use the espressif monitor to view.

$ west espressif monitor

After the board has automatically reset and booted, you should see the following message in the monitor:

***** Booting Zephyr OS vx.x.x-xxx-gxxxxxxxxxxxx *****
Hello World! xiao_esp32c6/esp32c6

Debugging

As with much custom hardware, the ESP32-C6 modules require patches to OpenOCD that are not upstreamed yet. Espressif maintains their own fork of the project. The custom OpenOCD can be obtained at OpenOCD ESP32 [2].

The Zephyr SDK uses a bundled version of OpenOCD by default. You can overwrite that behavior by adding the -DOPENOCD=<path/to/bin/openocd> -DOPENOCD_DEFAULT_PATH=<path/to/openocd/share/openocd/scripts> parameter when building.

Here is an example for building the Hello World application.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b xiao_esp32c6 samples/hello_world -- -DOPENOCD=<path/to/bin/openocd> -DOPENOCD_DEFAULT_PATH=<path/to/openocd/share/openocd/scripts>
west flash

You can debug an application in the usual way. Here is an example for the Hello World application.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b xiao_esp32c6 samples/hello_world
west debug

References