Meet ESP32-C3 Board on top of a Rechargeable 16340 Battery

What can be better than ESP8266 and ESP32? Maybe a battery-powered ESP32-C3 board designed to provide lower power consumption.

LILYGO® has just launched an ESP32-C3 board with a rechargeable 16340 battery holder. The new board, aptly named LILYGO TTGO T-OI PLUS consumes lesser power as its SoC single-core RISC-V processor uses 5uA and 130uA in deep and light sleep modes respectively in contrast to its counterparts’ ESP8266 and ESP32 which consume approximately 20uA and 2000uA in deep and light sleep modes respectively.

The TTGO T-OI PLUS is furnished with the capability of charging the LiPo battery attached through its charging circuit. The board’s battery level can be monitored with software with a few lines of code to read the voltage divider signature on its Pin A0. The board also comes with 3 LEDs — Green (indicates communication over UART), Blue (charging indicator) and Red (always-ON power indicator). A GitHub user who made a little tweak with the board said the Red LED can be killed manually by taking it off with a screwdriver. This tweak however lowered the overall deep sleep current from 1mA to 110uA, which undoubtedly is acceptable if one would like to prevent quick battery discharge.

The TTGO T-OI PLUS board also has the same headers pinout with the T-OI ESP8266 board, so it’s safe to say that both have expansion modules that are compatible.

Features and Specifications of the board include:

• Espressif Systems 32-bit ESP32-C3 single-core RISC-V processor with:
  • 160MHz clock speed
  • 400KB SRAM, 384KB ROM and 8KB SRAM in RTC
  • 2x 12-bit SAR ADCs, up to 6 channels
  • 3 x SPI, 2 x UART, 1 x 12C, 1 x 12S, LED PWM, TWAI, Timers, RMT, full-speed USB serial
  • IEEE802.11b/g/n-compliant, Support stations, SoftAp, SoftAp + station mode
  • Bluetooth 5.0, Bluetooth mesh
• 2MB or 4MB flash
• Ceramic antenna and IPEX connector
• USB-C port for power and programming
• 2x 8-pin headers with 12x GPIO, 1x SPI, 1x UART, 3x ADC, 5V, 3.3V, GND
• 4-pin 2.0mm I2C Grove connector
• Power and charging LEDs
• Reset button
• Power switch
• Power Supply
• 5V power supply via USB Type-C port
• Battery holder for 3.7V 16340 LiPo battery plus charging circuit
• Dimensions: 45.7 mm x 25.8 mm x 15.8 mm

Code for TTGO T-OI PLUS can be found on Github as made available by LILYGO. The code is fully written in C++ though the available documentation was initially written for T-OI ESP8266 and may require a little tweaking to work properly.

LILYGO TTGO T-OI PLUS is currently available and sells on Aliexpress for $4.98 plus shipping.

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