ESP32-C3 simulation: Seeed Studio XIAO

The Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32-C3 is a thumb-sized board built around Espressif’s ESP32-C3, a single-core 32-bit RISC-V chip with an integrated 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi radio. It shares the XIAO footprint with the RP2040 board: eleven I/O pins on the silkscreen, USB-C, and a battery connector.

It takes a merged flash image (.bin), not an ELF — the same artifact esptool writes to a real board, containing the bootloader, partition table, and application.

Run firmware on this board

Open two controllers sharing a bus or the display and button example. Inspect the merged flash image and circuit before adapting either project. The hardware comparison publishes a separate ESP32-C3 loopback workload with measured traces.

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Datasheet

The ESP32-C3 datasheet and technical reference manual cover the register map, interrupt matrix, and radio.

Pins

Board pin	ESP32-C3 GPIO	Typical function
D0	GPIO2	GPIO / A0
D1	GPIO3	GPIO / A1
D2	GPIO4	GPIO / A2
D3	GPIO5	GPIO / A3
D4	GPIO6	I2C SDA
D5	GPIO7	I2C SCL
D6	GPIO21	UART TX
D7	GPIO20	UART RX
D8	GPIO8	SPI SCK
D9	GPIO9	SPI MISO
D10	GPIO10	SPI MOSI
3V3, 5V, GND	—	Power rails

Those bus functions are defaults, not fixed wiring. The simulator follows the live ESP32-C3 GPIO matrix for I2C master traffic, including routes across D1–D7, so firmware can choose its SDA and SCL pads at runtime.

Wi-Fi

The radio is not a pin. Join it to an RF Environment by adding this component’s ID to that room’s members — RF membership is a scene relationship, not a wire.

Firmware that brings up a SoftAP can then be reached from a Wi-Fi Network, including from a real browser tab. Association, DHCP, DNS and TCP all happen over simulated frames, so RF loss and collisions apply.

Internal temperature sensor

The ESP32-C3 temperature sensor measures the silicon die, not room air, and it has no external pin. Firmware may use ESP-IDF’s driver/temperature_sensor.h API or access the APB SAR ADC and private analog range registers directly.

Set ambientTemperatureCelsius in the board configuration to describe the air around the XIAO; it defaults to 25 °C. The reported die temperature then follows a deterministic two-stage package/junction model:

• CPU-idle operation warms above ambient.
• Starting Wi-Fi adds radio self-heating; sustained traffic adds a smaller, bounded load based on transmitted and received frames.
• Junction temperature reacts quickly while the tiny board/package heats and cools much more slowly.
• The 8-bit conversion has seeded adjacent-code jitter, a factory-style per-chip eFuse correction, the documented five DAC ranges, clock/reset/power gating, and 300 µs settling.

At the default 25 °C ambient, a fresh board starts near 30 °C, settles in the low 30s while idle, and approaches roughly 60–70 °C under sustained Wi-Fi depending on packet activity. These are useful, repeatable engineering values rather than a promise about the temperature of every physical enclosure or power supply.

const c3 = project.graph.addComponent(Components.XIAO_ESP32C3, {
  config: { ambientTemperatureCelsius: 30 },
});

Debug output

Channel	Description
uart0	Serial console — everything printf/ESP_LOG writes

The channel streams to the terminal panel live and is readable afterwards with run.logs({ from: "mcu1:uart0" }).