XIAO ESP32C3 3PCS Pack - RISC-V Tiny MCU Board with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth5.0, Battery Charge Supported, Power Efficiency and Rich Interface

TL;DR You can't go wrong with XIAO ESP32C3. I never have any problems with these boards. I highly recommend them. PROS - Quality boards - Clear silk screening - Onboard battery charging (others don't have this) - Excellent documentation online CONS - There is no way to monitor battery life onboard, they need to add an analog pad for reading this

I picked up this three-pack to prototype some home automation projects, and I’ve been consistently impressed with how much capability Seeed Studio has packed into something roughly the size of a thumb drive. The Hardware The ESP32C3 is built on a RISC-V core running at 160MHz, which is a refreshing departure from the Xtensa architecture of older ESP chips. In practice it handles Wi-Fi and BLE tasks without breaking a sweat. The form factor is genuinely tiny — it fits on a breadboard with pins to spare — yet it still manages to expose 11 GPIO pins, hardware UART/I2C/SPI, and a decent ADC. There’s even an onboard ceramic antenna and a u.FL connector if you need external range. For my two builds, that onboard antenna was more than adequate throughout the house. Real-World Projects I put two of the three boards to work immediately. The first became a water softener salt monitor using an ultrasonic distance sensor to track the salt level in the brine tank. The ESP32C3 reads the sensor, does a little math, and pushes the level to Home Assistant via MQTT over Wi-Fi. It wakes, reads, reports, and goes back to deep sleep — all in a few seconds. Battery life on a small LiPo has been excellent. The second board is a freezer monitor watching for temperature excursions with a DS18B20 probe. It alerts me if the door is accidentally left ajar or if something goes wrong. Both projects came together quickly thanks to the board’s compatibility with the Arduino IDE and ESP-IDF, and the wealth of community libraries already targeting the ESP32 family. Value At roughly $5–6 per board when bought as a three-pack, these are hard to beat. You get USB-C, a built-in battery charge circuit (great for portable/sleep-based builds), and solid documentation from Seeed. Competing options at this price point often sacrifice one of those three things. Minor Gripes The pads are small, and fine soldering is required if you want to attach wires directly rather than using header pins. Beginners might find the initial toolchain setup slightly fiddly, though Seeed’s wiki covers it well. Also, the onboard LED is wired in a slightly non-obvious way compared to other boards — worth checking the pinout before debugging “why won’t my LED blink.” Bottom Line If you’re building IoT sensors, home automation nodes, or any low-power connected device, the XIAO ESP32C3 punches well above its price. The three-pack makes it easy to prototype, dedicate a board to a finished project, and still have a spare. Highly recommended for makers of any level.

I needed battery power for my model train real time speedometer project (using an IR sensor to detect track tie rate beneath the car). A 150 mAh Lipo lasts about an hour and charges again in about 15 minutes. Build quality is excellent, connection labels are clear, and it is thoughtfully packaged. The COM port was recognized immediately by the ESP IDF running on VS Code. I've had no issues with it so far, including sending real time speed values over BLE and ESP-NOW. Consequently, I've purchased several more XIAO ESP32-C3s for my other projects.

I'm using these for Home Assistant and room presense (ESPresense) and so far they work well. I had another brand that had a built-in WiFi antenna (red chip-like thing on the board) and it seemed to be ok, but the WiFi died on it a couple of weeks later. These have a plug in (fragile plug and thin little antenna panel), which I don't really prefer, but they seem to work well so far. I just need to get used to how to adjust ESPresense and the Bluetooth strength of these boards. I wish there was a little plastic box to put these into that would make them pleasing to the eye, but I'll figure that out. Flashing them was a breeze and for a 3 pack the price was right. I did solder the pin headers on the board and that went pretty well. For the price, the quality seems good.

Works very well for it's size and cost. Was able to build my own ESP32 Oil monitor which communicates via WIFI with home assistant. I've used a couple of different ESP32's and this one is my favorite. It's capability and size make it my go-to.

I've become a big fan of Seeed Studios XIAO MCUs. I have very little to complain about. I've purchased the S3, C3, and C6 versions and they've all worked perfectly, not a dud in the bunch. All the XIAO's are the same size and have the same number of pins which I find convenient for the stuff I do. I wish I'd discovered these about a year ago.

I love the XIAO dev boards! Always work, and when pre soldered they are always very well made.

Great little boards and incredible value for the money. Perfect for ESPHome. Dead bug it or solder onto a protoboard with the castellated pads. I didn’t realize it had a built-in battery circuit, have not messed around with that but I intend to try it out sometime. No temp wire makes me nervous though. Can’t get easier to program and flash than ESPHome builder- Claude code can just spit out the yaml you need and you’re up and running in seconds. Comes with little WiFi antennas but I actually found the reception isn’t too bad without it.

I received missing 1 out of the 3 boards

Super Produkt, aber bei Amazon viel zu teuer mit viel zu langer Versandzeit. Man bekommt das Produkt für weniger als die Hälfte mit deutlich geringerer Lieferzeit aus deutschem Lager beim Hersteller selbst.