Last time Hackaday went hands on with a product from German company MNT, it was the Reform laptop; a full size computer with a full feature set and fully open source design. Now they’re back with the same value proposition and feature set crammed into a much more adorable (and colorful!) package with the MNT Pocket Reform. If you want the big Reform’s open source philosophy in a body fit for a coat pocket, this might be the computing device for you.

To refresh your memory, MNT is a company that specializes in open source hardware and the software to support it. They are probably best known for the Reform, their first laptop. Its marquis feature is a fully open design, from the mechanical components (designed with OSS tools) to the PCBAs (designed with KiCad) to the software (designed with, uh, software). When originally shipped that product packed a DIMM-style System On Module (SOM) with a default configuration containing a quad core NXP i.MX8M Quad and 4GB of RAM, as well as mini PCIe Card and M key m.2 2280 slots on the motherboard for storage and connectivity. That computer was designed to be easily serviceable and included a plethora of full sized ports along with easy to source cylindrical battery cells. The Pocket Reform takes the same intent and channels it into a much smaller package.

Speeds and Feeds

Looking at the Pocket Reform side by side with big Reform, the family resemblance is clear. From the smooth bead-blasted finish on the aluminum chassis to the chamfered edges to the squared off profile, you won’t mistake this for anything besides a Reform. And picking it up is no different. The Pocket Reform is so rigid and dense you almost believe someone forgot to machine out the center of this block of billet. The only blemishes are the obviously necessary IO ports on one edge, and slightly different texture on the top lid (more on that in a moment).

Despite its stature the Pocket Reform accepts the same processor SOMs as big Reform. By default it will ship with a newer, souped-up SOM from the same vendor, Boundary Devices. This one will include an I.MX8M Plus with 8 GB RAM and a 128GB EMMC, as well as a possible small overclock. However for the most part the alternative SOMs developed for big Reform will work just as well, such as the Pi 4 compute card adapter. The caveat is that they need to support the correct display interface (for example we were warned the substantially more powerful LS1028A module would need an adapter).

For ports, the Pocket sports a somewhat more limited but modern selection; two USB-C (one with Power Delivery to charge the Pocket), micro SD, ix Industrial Ethernet port (adaptable to RJ45), and micro HDMI. These are all exposed on the right edge of the display, while the left side has a blanking plate just waiting for an ambitious hacker to modify. Internally the mainboard has two m.2 slots; one 2280 with PCIe intended for NVMe storage and one 2242 with USB for connectivity, suggesting a cell modem or the like. Non-WWAN wireless connectivity is up to the SOM, with the default Boundary board including WiFi 802.11ac and Bluetooth 5.0. Notable for our post-COVID world is the addition of an onboard mono speaker and mic, two devices missing from the original Reform.

Pop open the magnetically-latched display and fold the screen to a comfortable angle and you’ll discover the cornucopia of IO within. We know our readers are nothing if not input-enthusiasts, so rejoice in the knowledge that even in this reduced form factor low profile Kailh Choc switches carry the mechanical keyboard torch accompanied by a diminutive trackball. MNT says the entire Pocket was sized to match the smallest keyboard they could reasonably ask a user to type on and they got their millimeter’s worth. In our brief fingers-on with the RGB backlit keyboard it was as satisfying as you’d expect for the low profile mechanical Choc switches and seems like it would be a blast to tap away at once you were acclimated to the ortholinear design and compact layout. Though small, the trackball was no slouch either; letting us whip the cursor around with wild abandon as well as position precisely. The only confusion was from the fully remappable “clicking” button layout, but that is easily adjustable to match the user’s preference.

A few final tidbits. The display is sharp at 1920×1200 on a miniscule 7” diagonal footprint, but depending on your eyes high density may not solve small size. Suffice to say that at 310 ppi you can choose freely between less bigger content and more microscopic letters, though if you choose bigger content there may be relatively little of it. And yes Thinkpad fans, the hinges (taken from big Reform) allow the screen to fold open to a fully flat 180º.

The chassis divides batteries and input devices into the bottom half, with display, mainboard, and ports into the top. In our uncalibrated hands it felt well balanced and not likely to tip when used on a flat surface. It’s small enough that it could conceivably be used for handheld thumb typing or gaming, though that would probably require a customized keyboard and input device. Finally the topmost surface on the lid is actually a single blank PCB (note the pleasing raw copper finish on the MNT logo) for easy design customizability or expansion.

Why Build It Now?

With the original MNT Reform shipping recently in 2021 and Pocket Reform slated to reuse the core components, we wondered why the time was right to ship this product now. One of the main drivers was accessibility without compromising feature completeness. We will dig into Pocket Reform pricing in more detail but comparable hardware configurations cost about $500 less in Pocket form than in big Reform size. Those savings can be attributed to a mixture of things well summarized as “fewer components and smaller size”. Smaller size means less material used, one big mainboard with everything on it means fewer cable harnesses, and on and on. But the broader point still stands that for a product like this the market isn’t any more crowded now than it was a few years ago.

Like the original MNT Reform, this is a polarizing device. Want something thin and light? That’s not the Pocket Reform (thought it might fit in a generous cargo pants pocket). Care about a screen with the deepest blacks and highest refresh rate? Also not Pocket Reform. Gaming on the go? Retro emulators are probably a great experience, but you won’t be playing AAA shooters. And at a starting price of $899 it is out of impulse buy territory for most people. But not every product needs to appeal to the middle of the bell curve, modern manufacturing accessibility lets companies successfully target the ends of the spectrum to find niche customers who are underserved by other options. MNT is betting that there are enough people looking for a secondary device for distraction free writing on the go or the hard core couch surfing who are drawn to something either more open or just more interesting and are willing to take the leap.

Users and the Future

As before and above all else, what makes the MNT Reform family stand out to us is openness. If you want a fully libre device which is also an off the shelf commercial product, which you can buy as a fully functional, fully assembled product and use right out of the box, the Reforms are pretty much it. There are other laptops that prioritize repairability, but they don’t provide sources for any of their components and you can’t replicate or modify either their hardware or closed source software yourself. There are single board computers and keyboard cases that run free or mostly free software, but their hardware sources aren’t available either.

Looking at the trajectory of the Reform products so far, we can extrapolate out to what might come next. If the Pocket Reform mainboard and SOMs are compatible, and the input devices are compatible, you can remix them bigger just as easily as smaller. It sounds like MNT is aware that there are untapped users who are interested in large and thin instead of the Pocket’s small but thick. Maybe these users are philosophically aligned with the approach but prioritize portability over the ability to easily expand the device with more modules. If you take the big Reform chassis but swap the trackball and cylindrical battery cells to remove unused space, then drop in a Pocket Reform mainboard (which again, takes the same SOMs) that leaves you with a pretty compelling package. We’re excited to see what MNT has in store for us next.

When we met our contact from MNT in the coffee shop, he was quietly working away on his laptop. Jet black and standing thick it was like an encyclopedia that didn’t quite blend in with the sea of silver MacBook lookalikes on the surrounding tables. After going through all the speeds and feeds we eagerly got our 64 piece driver kit out to open it up and see what made this marvel tick, but when the laptop was turned over it became clear that no tools were needed. The entire bottom of the machine was a single rectangle of transparent acrylic revealing everything from sharp white status LEDs on the bare mainboard to individual 18650 LiFePO4 battery cells in a tidy row. In a sense that’s the summary of the entire product: it’s a real laptop you can use to get work done, and every element of it from design to fabrication is completely transparent.

The device pictured here is called the Reform and is designed and manufactured by MNT, a company in Berlin, Germany (note MNT stands for MNT, it’s not an acronym). The Reform is a fully open source laptop which is shipping today and available via distribution through Crowd Supply. If the aesthetic doesn’t make it clear the Reform is an opinionated product designed from the ground up to optimize for free-as-in-freedom: from it’s solid metal chassis to the blob-free GNU/Linux distribution running inside.

We’re here to tell you that we’ve held one, it’s real, and it’s very well built.

The Hard Numbers

Let’s get the spec punch list out of the way first. The currently shipping MNT Reform is powered by a Boundary Devices Nitrogen 8M System On Module which contains a quad core 1.5 GHz ARM64 processor (the NXP i.MX8M Quad) with 4 GB of RAM. This is packaged into a module that slots into a SODIMM slot on the mainboard next to a standard M key m.2 2280 socket with PCIe for an NVMe drive of the user’s choice, and a mini PCIe card slot for a WiFi or cell radio. All together this should make for a serviceable hardware package for daily use, especially with that fast PCIe storage, though the processor will be a little anemic by the standards of a modern personal computer, or even a high end smartphone.

Exposed along the edges of the laptop chassis are three USB 3 ports in the USB-A form factor, full sized SD card, a 1/8″ TRRS jack, gigabit Ethernet, and power via a barrel jack. If we were designing a machine from scratch today, we’d love to see that barrel jack replaced with USB-C and Power Delivery, but that’s a minor complaint, and as the saying goes the sources are available, so we could always fix that ourselves!

Moving to the outside we can report that the MNT Reform feels exactly the way it looks in all the pictures; like an absolute brick of a machine. This particular unit has been lovingly bestickered but the bead-blasted, CNC milled chassis is absolutely every bit as well-built as we had hoped. In traditional notebook reviews, thin and light laptops get lambasted for wibbly-wobbly bendy screens and failing the “one handed open test”, which checks if the display can be opened without a second hand to keep the base of the computer planted on the table. The Reform certainly has no problems in either of these departments. The screen escapes its retaining magnets with a satisfying pop and swings smoothly open to past 180º on stiff hinges with nary a complaint or flex in sight.

Human Interface

Lacking a camera or internal microphone, the primary interface an operator will have with the MNT Reform is via keyboard and pointing device. As the astute reader has no doubt noticed, this portable computer is rather thick compared to the slivers of aluminium that you’d find at your favorite electronics retailer. But thickness has some tangible benefits in the interface department.

First we’ll point out the pointing device, which is a modular USB peripheral the user can specify when purchasing the machine. Besides the 1337-hacker choice to have no pointing device at all, the Reform is available in two configurations; trackpad and luxurious trackball.

We haven’t seen the trackpad in person so can only speculate about how it operates. It’s an off the shelf capacitive affair packaged under glass to give your digits the smoothest glide possible. It supports a standard range of multi finger gestures and we’re sure it’s perfectly fine. But this is Hackaday, so we were absolutely thrilled to get our digits on the glorious trackball.

The trackball is an option that emphasizes the aesthetic the Reform is really built to indulge. The ball and five mechanical keys are packed into the same rectangular surface area as the trackpad to allow either to be installed, but there is plenty of room to maneuver. The ball is big at 2.5 centimetres in diameter, and just the right balance between tacky for good finger grip and smooth for easy rolling. Significantly, the ball is large enough that it’s easy to execute precise movements without much trouble, an issue we’ve experienced before on tiny trackballs.

Above the pointing device is the keyboard, and what a keyboard it is. As enthusiasts ourselves, we were excited to see that the unusually deep chassis here was leveraged once again to include real mechanical switches for a premium typing feel. These aren’t full sized keyswitches, but Kailh Choc low profile switches. Even so they provide a deep 3 mm of travel, closer to the 4 mm of a traditional full size Cherry MX switch than the 1 mm you’d get on a 2021 keyboard from Apple.

The keyboard layout is not completely standard, but with a little typing we don’t think it would be a problem. The other notable detail is the keycaps themselves. Kailh Choc switches use special keycaps that are typically of the utterly flat chicklet variety in vogue on modern laptops. Bucking this trend once again, the Reform has very deep keys which we found helped our digits distinguish them when typing quickly. Needless to say in our short time with the machine it was a very comfortable keyboard to clack away at. The only note against it was the flexure in the center of the deck, which got a little bouncy when we were aggressive with the keys. But this was only noticeable after it was specifically pointed out as an area for improvement.

Also notable is the small display above the keyboard. This is a sort of system management display, or rather an interface to the main processor’s supervisory micro. It connects with the keyboard and allows the user to view certain system information like battery status even while the machine is completely off. Of course it’s fully programmable just like the rest of the system.

To wrap up the device, we will mostly elide what it was like in the few minutes we spent using it as a computer. It’s fine. It’s a Linux computer. If you’ve used one before you know what to expect here, which is in its own way a complement in its banality. By default each machine comes with the relatively conservative Debian distribution and a mainline kernel, so for daily use you won’t need to be a terminal wizard and switching to another OS should be straightforward.

The Reform is a niche product for a niche audience. It’s unapologetically hefty. An interested buyer will pay north of $999 to buy one, and at that lower price will have to assemble it themselves: pre-assembled units start at $1,550. It has a processor that is sufficient for daily use but lags behind the latest 4.5 GHz burst octa-core behemoth from Intel or AMD. But none of that is the point.

Comparable ‘Rigs

It’s hard to come up with a substantial list of competitors to the MNT Reform. If you were lucky enough to be in the market for a portable computer at the right time there was the Novena; a similarly open source, similarly expensive, similarly rectangular computing device from [Bunny] and [Xobs]. More recently there are the devices from Pine64, the Pinebook and Pinebook Pro. These are also easy to service, though there isn’t nearly enough room inside for much in the way of additions. They have even more anemic processors than the Reform, and most importantly have open software but – as far as we know – totally closed hardware. Lastly there is the tide of cyberdecks (which we love!), generally in the form of a Raspberry Pi coupled to a battery, screen and keyboard. Few if any of these are commercial products, and even if they were, the constituent parts are similarly non-free.

And that’s it. Besides the Novena we’re hard pressed to find any totally comparable devices, especially not ones with commercial availability and a production volume higher than one. We’re sure you’ll let us know if we missed something. So that leaves us with an unusual beast in the MNT Reform. It’s open to a fault, from the bits in the flash to the atoms in the aluminum. It’s built by hand by a four person team in Berlin (plus requisite shop dog). Its thickness is best measured in integer inches, and it’s fairly expensive. So why does it exist?

In some ways these unusual traits hearken back to one of the influences of the MNT Reform: retrocomputing. Not in the literal sense that this is a Commodore 64, but in the spirit of the thing. The machine is large and invites you to poke around inside, with clear labels and an easy entry method. It comes with a thick manual that starts with friendly instructions about how to get around the Linux command line and ends with the complete schematics for the entire machine. It’s a useful tool but also one you can learn and grow with. And from that openness inspires people to learn from its example and mod it to suit their needs.

Building a completely open computer whose every design element caters to a group of enthusiastic hackers means that it didn’t take long for improvements to begin appearing. The highest profile of these might be the new keyboard design from crowd favorites OLKB, known for making a variety of diminutive keyboards with ortholinear layouts like the Planck. Of course this new keyboard is only real when it’s shipping, but as OLKB is a long established entity with a history of shipping keyboards in relatively high volume it seems like a safe bet.
Besides a new keyboard we’ve heard of multiple replacement System On Modules which should change the available compute capabilities in exciting ways and keep the Reform usable for years to come. MNT itself is working with a partner to bring a module powered by the the NXP Layerscape LS1028A and a whopping 8 or 16 GB of RAM to market. And [Lukas Hartmann] the founder of MNT has posted some very tantalizing renders of a SOM card containing a burly Kintex-7 FPGA which may one day play host to anything from RISC-V cores to a supercomputer of Z80s.

Where Do We Go From Here?

This is a real laptop, that you can buy today. It’s built out of high quality materials and will probably survive the rigors of daily metro trips in a messenger bag, and dirt from working in the park. It runs software whose source you can inspect in totality and build yourself, and if the color doesn’t suit your liking the mechanical CAD is available to manufacture your own enclosure. The processor isn’t the cutting edge but it’s socketed and can be trivially replaced so we expect it to continue evolving and improving.

That diversity we talked about above is really the takeaway from our time with the MNT Reform. We live in a world where professional-grade manufacturing capability is easily accessible to a casual hobbyist, let alone a motivated team like MNT. It’s possible to produce a real commercial electronics product of non-trivial complexity for a niche market, and that’s nothing short of astounding. With a global audience we’re not worried in the least about selling through the initial 450 unit manufacturing run. So why shouldn’t it exist?

Bonus Round: A Moment of Keyboard

Engaged Hackaday readers may note MNT has another upcoming product which is a close relative to the the Reform laptop. The keyboard we praised earlier has grown legs and stepped away from the trackball to become a standalone product. We had a chance to spend a few minutes with a preproduction unit and can confirm it’s exactly as satisfying as the integrated version. In fact, besides a firmware update, it’s literally the same as the one in the Reform laptop. Same extra deep keycaps, same satisfying but tactile action on the Kailh Choc keyswitches, and same programmable OLED screen. In this case the screen obviously isn’t integrated into the host machine so it’s relegated to providing metadata about the keyboard’s configuration, but MNT indicates you can draw to it with properly formed USB HID packets. We’re looking forward to the first Mavis Beacon integration. If you’re looking for a thin and light mechanical keyboard for on the go clacks and dig the unusual layout, it may be worth a look.

We love to see LEDs combined in all shapes and sizes, so we were especially ticked when we caught a glimpse of [Debra Ansell]’s (also known as [GeekMomProjects]) interlocking triangular TriangleLightPanel system glowing on our screen. This unusually shaped array seemed to be self supporting and brightly glowing, so we had to know more.

The TriangleLightPanel is a single, triangular, light panel (refreshing when everything is in the name, isn’t it?).  Each panel consists of a single white PCBA holding three side-firing SK6812 LEDs aimed inward, covered by transparent acrylic. When the LEDs are doing their thing, the three-position arrangement and reflective PCB surface does diffuses the light sufficiently to illuminate each pane — if not perfectly evenly — very effectively. Given the simple construction it’s difficult to imagine how they could be significantly improved.

The real trick is the mechanical arrangement. Instead of being connected with classic Dupont jumper wires and 0.1″ headers or some sort of edge connector, [Debra] used spring contacts. But if you’re confused by the lack of edge-plated fingers think again; the connectors are simple plated strips on the back. There is a second PCBA which effectively acts as wires and a surface to mount the spring contacts on, which is bolted onto the back of the connected leaves to bridge between each node. The tiles need to be mechanically connected in any case, so it’s a brilliantly simple way to integrate the electrical connection with the necessary mechanical one.

All the requisite source files are available on the project’s GitHub page and the original Tweets announcing the project are here for reference. We can’t wait to see what this would look like with another 30 or 40 nodes! Enterprising hackers are already building their own setup; see [arturo182]’s 24 tile array glowing after the break.

Unfortunately, I ran out of screws and nuts, with 4 needed per leaf, they go faster than I anticipated. Ordering more soon

Either way, my leaves are growing :)

(Powered by the RP2040 Stamp + Carrier) pic.twitter.com/rOWOojFnDa

— arturo182 (@arturo182) May 22, 2021

Without knowing it, we’ve spent years watching [Jasper Sikken] piece together an empire of energy harvesting equipment, and now he’s putting the pieces together into wonderful creations. His recently finished solar harvesting pyramids are mesmerizing objects of geometric perfection we’d love to see glinting in the sun.

These solar harvesting pyramids are well described by their name. Each one contains a PCBA around 30mm on a side with a solar energy harvester built around the dedicated AEM10941 IC, a single solar cell, and a very bright green LED. [Jasper] calculates that the solar cell will charge the super capacitor at 20uA at with just 200 lux of light (a level typical for casual indoor spaces) letting it run indefinitely when placed indoors. Amazingly with the LED blinking for 15ms every 2 seconds it will run for 21 days in complete darkness. And that’s it! This is a software-free piece of hardware which requires no input besides dim light and blinks an LED indefinitely.

What about that super capacitor? It’s called a Lithium Ion Capacitor (LIC) and is a hybrid between a typical rechargeable lithium battery and an electrolytic capacitor, offering extremely high capacity in a convenient two leg through hole form factor. This one is a whopping 30 Farad at 3.8 V, and we first saw it when [Jasper] won the Hackaday Earth Day contest last month. Check out that link if you want to know more about their uses and how to integrate them.

For more detail about all of the components of the solar pyramid we need only turn to the Hackaday archives. In December 2019 [Tom Nardi] wrote about building a cheap degassing system for making some very familiar looking resin pyramids. And before that [Donald Papp] brought us another familiar piece of the pyramid when he wrote up a different 1″ x 1″ solar harvesting system that [Jasper] designed.

Check out the video after the break to see what one of these gems looks like from all sides. And for many more experiments leading up the final pyramid check out the logs on the Hackaday.io page.

Our favorite raft of otters is back at it again with another display of open source audio prowess as they bring us the OtterCastAmp, the newest member of the OtterCast family of open source audio multitools. If you looked at the previous entry in the series – the OtterCastAudio – and thought it was nice but lacking in the pixel count or output power departments then this is the device for you.

The Amp is fundamentally a very similar device to the OtterCastAudio. It shares the same Allwinner S3 Cortex-A application processor and runs the same embedded Linux build assembled with Buildroot. In turn it offers the same substantial set of features and audio protocol support. It can be targeted by Snapcast, Spotify Connect or AirPlay if those are your tools of choice, or act as a generic PulseAudio sink for your Linux audio needs. And there’s still a separate line in so it source audio as well.

One look at the chassis and it’s clear that unlike the OtterCastAudio this is not a simple Chromecast Audio replacement. The face of the OtterCastAmp is graced by a luscious 340×800 LCD for all the cover art your listening ear can enjoy. And the raft of connectors in the back (and mountain of inductors on the PCBA) make it clear that this is a fully fledged class D amplifier, driving up to 120W of power across four channels. Though it may drive a theoretical 30W or 60W peak across its various outputs, with a maximum supply power of 100W (via USB-C power delivery, naturally) the true maximum output will be a little lower. Rounding out the feature set is an Ethernet jack and some wonderfully designed copper PCB otters to enjoy inside and out.

As before, it looks like this design is very close to ready for prime time but not quite there yet, so order at your own risk. Full fab files and some hints are linked in the repo mentioned above. If home fabrication is a little much it looks like there might be a small manufacturing run of these devices coming soon.

Few things get a Hackaday staffer excited like bunches of tiny LEDs. The smaller and denser the better, any form will do as long as we can get a macro shot or a video of a buttery smooth animation. This time we turn to [Sawaiz Syed] and [Open Kolibri] to deliver the brightly lit goods with the minuscule HALO 90 reactive LED earrings.

The HALO 90’s are designed to work as earrings, though we suspect they’d make equally great brooches, hair accessories, or desk objects. To fit this purpose each one is a minuscule 24 mm in diameter and weighs a featherweight 5.2 grams with the CR2032 battery (2.1 g for the PCBA alone). Functionally their current software includes three animation modes, each selectable via a button on device; audio reactive, halo (fully lit), and sparkle. Check out the documentation for details on expected battery life in each mode, but suffice to say that no matter what these earrings will make it through a few nights out.

In terms of hardware, the HALO 90’s are as straightforward as you’d expect. Each device is driven by an STM8 at its maximum 16MHz which is more than fast enough to keep the 90 charliplexed 0402 LEDs humming along at a 1kHz update rate, even with realtime audio processing. In fact the BOM here is refreshingly simple with just 8 components; the LEDs, microcontroller and microphone, battery holder and passives, and the button. [Sawaiz] even designed an exceptionally slick case to go with each pair of earrings, which holds two HALO 90’s with two CR2032’s and includes a magnetic closure for the most satisfying lid action possible.

As with some of his other work, [Sawaiz] has produced a wealth of exceptional documentation to go with the HALO 90’s. They’re available straight from him fully assembled, but with documentation this good the path to a home build should be well lit and accessible. He’s even chosen parts with an eye towards long availability, low cost, and ease of sourcing so no matter when you decide to get started it should be a snap.

It was difficult to choose just a few images from [Sawaiz]’s mesmerizing collection, so if you need more feast your eyes on the expanded set after the break.

If you’re a reader of Hackaday, then you’ve almost certainly encountered an Espressif part. The twin microcontroller families ESP8266 and ESP32 burst onto the scene and immediately became the budget-friendly microcontroller option for projects of all types. We’ve seen the line expand recently with the ESP32-C3 (packing a hacker-friendly RISC-V core) and ESP32-S3 with oodles of IO and fresh new CPU peripherals. Now we have a first peek at the ESP32-C6; a brand new RISC-V based design with the hottest Wi-Fi standard on the block; Wi-Fi 6.

There’s not much to go on here besides the standard Espressif block diagram and a press release, so we’ll tease out what detail we can. From the diagram it looks like the standard set of interfaces will be on offer; they even go so far as to say “ESP32-C6 is similar to ESP32-C3” so we’ll refer you to [Jenny’s] excellent coverage of that part. In terms of other radios the ESP32-C6 continues Espressif’s trend of supporting Bluetooth 5.0. Of note is that this part includes both the coded and 2 Mbps Bluetooth PHYs, allowing for either dramatically longer range or a doubling of speed. Again, this isn’t the first ESP32 to support these features but we always appreciate when a manufacturer goes above and beyond the minimum spec.

The headline feature is, of course, Wi-Fi 6 (AKA 802.11ax). Unfortunately this is still exclusively a 2.4GHz part, so if you’re looking for 5GHz support (or 6GHz in Wi-Fi 6E) this isn’t the part for you. And while Wi-Fi 6 brings a bevy of features from significantly higher speed to better support for mesh networks, that isn’t the focus here either. Espressif have brought a set of IoT-centric features; two radio improvements with OFDMA and MU-MIMO, and the protocol feature Target Wake Time.

OFDMA and MU-MIMO are both different ways of allowing multiple connected device to communicate with an access point simultaneously. OFDMA allows devices to slice up and share channels more efficiency; allowing the AP more flexibility in allocating its constrained wireless resources. With OFDMA the access point can elect to give an entire channel to a single device, or slice it up to multiplex between more than once device simultaneously. MU-MIMO works similarly, but with entire antennas. Single User MIMO (SU-MIMO) allows an AP and connected device to communicate using a more than one antenna each. In contrast Multi User MIMO (MU-MIMO) allows APs and devices to share antenna arrays between multiple devices simultaneously, grouped directionally.

Finally there’s Target Wake Time, the simplest of the bunch. It works very similarly to the Bluetooth Low Energy (4.X and 5.X) concept of a connection interval, allowing devices to negotiate when they’re next going to communicate. This allows devices more focused on power than throughput to negotiate long intervals between which they can shut down their wireless radios (or more of the processor) to extended battery life.

These wireless features are useful on their own, but there is another potential benefit. Some fancy new wireless modes are only available on a network if every connected device supports them. A Wi-Fi 6 network with 10 Wi-Fi 6 devices and one W-Fi 5 (802.11ac) one may not be able to use all the bells and whistles, degrading the entire network to the lowest common denominator. The recent multiplication of low cost IoT devices has meant a corresponding proliferation of bargain-basement wireless radios (often Espressif parts!). Including new Wi-Fi 6 exclusive features in what’s sure to be an accessible part is a good start to alleviating problems with our already strained home networks.

When will we start seeing the ESP32-C6 in the wild? We’re still waiting to hear but we’ll let you know as soon as we can get our hands on some development hardware to try out.

Thanks to friend of the Hackaday [Fred Temperton] for spotting this while it was fresh!