ESP32-C5 Pico Brings Wi-Fi 6 to the Pico Footprint

A Pico-Shaped Board With a Very Different Radio

Waveshare has released the ESP32-C5 Pico, a development board that copies the Raspberry Pi Pico form factor and pin layout but swaps in a radio the Pico does not have: dual-band Wi-Fi 6 on both 2.4 and 5 GHz. For anyone with an existing Pico-compatible carrier board or HAT, this is a drop-in path to a modern wireless stack.

• Dual-band Wi-Fi 6 at 2.4 and 5 GHz, plus Bluetooth 5.0 LE with Mesh and 802.15.4 for Zigbee, Thread and Matter
• ESP32-C5HF4 silicon — a single-core 32-bit RISC-V processor at up to 240 MHz with a 48 MHz low-power RISC-V core alongside it
• Two 20-pin Pico-compatible headers exposing up to 26 GPIO and 20 PWM channels
• From $8.99 at the Waveshare store, rising to roughly $10.43 to $11.33 on AliExpress and $15.99 to $17.99 on Amazon

Memory is 384 KB of SRAM with 320 KB of ROM and 4MB of SPI flash. Connectivity covers I2C, SPI, UART, SDIO and JTAG over a USB Type-C port used for both power and programming, and the board supports a 3.7V lithium battery with an integrated charger.

Four Variants, Two Antennas

The board ships in four configurations that vary along two axes. The plain ESP32-C5-Pico has a PCB antenna and unsoldered headers; the -M adds pre-soldered headers; the -U swaps the PCB antenna for an external one; and the -UM combines the external antenna with pre-soldered headers. The PCB antenna version measures 56.85 by 21 mm, and the external antenna version is shorter at 51 by 21 mm.

The antenna choice is the one that matters in the field. A PCB antenna is cheaper and needs no assembly, but it is at the mercy of whatever enclosure you put it in — a metal box or a damp planter will cost you range. An external antenna on a pigtail lets you mount the radiating element where the signal is, which is often the difference between a sensor that reports reliably and one that does not.

Why Wi-Fi 6 on a Microcontroller Is Worth Having

The instinct is to shrug at Wi-Fi 6 on a device that will never saturate a link. The benefit is not throughput. It is that 5 GHz gives you a far less crowded band than the 2.4 GHz slice every other single board computer and smart plug in the building is fighting over, and Wi-Fi 6 features like target wake time let a battery-powered node negotiate longer sleep windows with the access point. For a deployment of a dozen sensors in an apartment block, both of those things show up as fewer dropped readings.

Adding 802.15.4 on the same chip is the other half of the appeal. That is the radio layer under Thread and Matter, so a single microcontroller can bridge a Thread mesh to a Wi-Fi network without a second module — a common enough requirement in home automation that it usually costs an extra board.

How Does It Compare With the Raspberry Pi Pico?

The pin-compatibility claim is the practical hook. Existing Pico add-on hardware should physically mate, and the 26 GPIO count is in the same neighbourhood. The trade is architectural: a single 240 MHz RISC-V core here against the Pico's dual Arm cores and programmable I/O blocks, in exchange for a radio the Pico family only partially matches. If a project is I/O-timing heavy, the Pico still wins; if it is radio-heavy, this is the easier board.

It joins a steady run of RISC-V boards in this form factor, including the recent YuzukiNeko, which runs full Linux at Pico size, and follows Waveshare-adjacent work like the ESP32-C5 Mini USB-C stick from earlier this year. More boards in our mini computer coverage.

Sources: CNX Software — September 9, 2026; Waveshare — accessed September 9, 2026.