It seemed like an unbelievable announcement that stirred excitement in the hobbyist community. ESP32 with Wi-Fi 6 support at both 2.4GHz and 5 GHz?
Updated: ESP32-C5 is in production three years after the release of this novelty (3/2022).
Unfortunately, we won’t receive much more information, and those that are available are only in Chinese.
ESP32-C5 Chip Highlights
– Equipped with a 32-bit RISC-V processor
– Integrated 2.4/5 GHz dual-band Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE)
– Optimizing cost and power for ultra-low-power IoT devices with permanent battery life
– With high connection reliability and perfect security mechanism
– Software supported by Espressif’s mature IoT development framework ESP-IDF
– Extended support for slave mode, can be connected with external host MCU through USB and SDIO interface, and provide wireless connection function
Source: https://www.espressif.com/zh-hans/news/ESP32-C5_short
ESP32-C5 supports protocols such as Thread, Zigbee, Matter, HomeKit, MQTT, and more. Of course, it also includes Bluetooth 5.
Support in ESP-IDF for ESP32-C5 should be available soon. Support in Arduino IDE is planned for 7/2025, with the release of Arduino Core 3.3.0 as an Official Release. Naturally, a beta version of Arduino Core will be available earlier.
ESP32-C5 Product Page https://www.espressif.com/en/products/socs/esp32-c5
Espressif already promised last year ESP32-C6, also with Wi-Fi 6 support, but only in the 2.4GHz band. There has been no sight or sound of C6 yet. We can thus assume that C5 will have a higher priority and perhaps the development of C6 has been completely halted.
