ESP32- C3 ; C5 ; C6 ; H2

[Starraker]

As we know Annex32 supports ESP32-C3 but there are three other processors released by Espressif that are very similar. These are the newly released ESP32-C5 and the ESP32-C6 and the older ESP32-H2. The last two are very similar to the C3 but the C5 can have one or two cores and transmits on both the 2.4 GHz and 5GHz bands and it and the C6 support Matter, Thread and Zigbee networking. Whereas the H2 excels in meshed WiFi and Matter networks.

I was wondering whether these other 3 processors are also able to be used with Annex32 or not ?

[lyizb]

As we know Annex32 supports ESP32-C3 but there are three other processors released by Espressif that are very similar. These are the newly released ESP32-C5 and the ESP32-C6 and the older ESP32-H2. The last two are very similar to the C3 but the C5 can have one or two cores and transmits on both the 2.4 GHz and 5GHz bands and it and the C6 support Matter, Thread and Zigbee networking. Whereas the H2 excels in meshed WiFi and Matter networks.

I was wondering whether these other 3 processors are also able to be used with Annex32 or not ?

The short answer is, obviously, no, they are not supported, otherwise, the firmwares would have been released.

Apart from the -H2, which doesn’t have WiFi support, all could potentially be supported by Annex (of course, with all the necessary modifications implemented).
However, their higher cost compared to other modules in the series makes it more interesting to buy -C3 or -S3 modules instead.
For sure, they bring WiFi-6 and other protocols, but honestly, I think there are already plenty of off-the-shelf products available and not expensive to support these new protocols.
Another big difficulty is that the development environment I use does not support these new modules, upgrade it to the latest version would require a huge effort, as there have been major changes that require a lot of code modifications, driver incompatibilities, etc.
I have already run in the past Annex on a -C6, just for testing with very few drivers but never tried the new protocols.
That said, once I find the courage to take a step forward with the SDK that can support these modules, I will try to publish a version, probably for the -C6.

[Starraker]

Francesco,

Thank you for your comprehensive answer to my naive question. I say naive because like the other 820 members and the myriad of non members I have no idea what it takes to support these modules especially when I see how quickly you have adopted several screen based modules recently.

The question arose because I recently saw the release announcement of the C5 and the sale of C6 modules and their subsequent inclusion in P4 modules and I wondered about why the C3 was the only one especially since C3 had very limited gpio's and notable problems in the aerial transmission.

However, thanks to your reply hopefully everybody understands that support of these items is not as easy as you sometimes make it seem.

Paul