Waveshare ESP32-C6 Touch-AMOLED-1.8: board tour

By EEDIY Team. Sample bought by us; no sponsorship and no affiliate links.

The Waveshare ESP32-C6-Touch-AMOLED-1.8 is a small development board in a black case. It combines an Espressif ESP32-C6 with a 1.8-inch touch AMOLED screen, power management, sensors and audio. This post covers what is on the board, based on the label on our unit and Waveshare’s own documentation.

New to this? Don’t worry about every chip name. The short version: it’s a tiny computer with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, a colour touch screen, a motion sensor, a clock, a speaker and microphone, and a memory-card slot, all in one small case. We explain each part below in plain words.

Check your hardware revision first

Waveshare ships two revisions that use the same pins but different display and touch chips [1][3]:

Revision	AMOLED driver	Touch controller
V1	SH8601	FT3168 / FT6146
V2	CO5300	CST820

Our unit’s label says SH8601 / FT3168, so it is a V1 board. Arduino examples are split by revision (examples/arduino for V1, examples/arduino-v2 for V2). The ESP-IDF BSP tells them apart by touch I2C address: 0x38 means V1, 0x15 means V2 [1][3].

What’s on the board (label vs. official docs)

Label on our unit	What it is	Official source
ESP32-C6	32-bit RISC-V SoC, up to 160 MHz. Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5 (LE), IEEE 802.15.4 (Zigbee 3.0 / Thread). 512 KB HP SRAM, 16 KB LP SRAM, 320 KB ROM. Onboard antenna	[1][2]
16MB FLASH	External 16 MB NOR flash. No PSRAM	[1][3]
1.8inch AMOLED, 368×448	1.8″ capacitive touch AMOLED, 368 × 448, 16.7M colours, QSPI. Waveshare lists 350 cd/m² brightness and 100000:1 contrast	[1][2]
Display SH8601	AMOLED driver (V1)	[1][2]
Touch FT3168	Capacitive touch controller over I2C (V1)	[1][2]
PMIC AXP2101	Power management: multiple voltage rails, battery charging and management	[1][2]
6-Axis IMU QMI8658	3-axis accelerometer and 3-axis gyroscope	[1][2]
RTC PCF85063	Real-time clock, kept powered from the Li battery through the AXP2101. Pads for a backup cell	[1][2]
Codec ES8311	Low-power audio codec	[1][2]
SPK	Onboard speaker output	[1]
MIC	Microphone for audio capture	[1][3]
Micro SD	TF (microSD) card slot, connected over SPI	[1][3]
IO Expander TCA9554	I2C I/O expander (TCA9554PWR on the schematic). Waveshare’s own docs page does not list it, but the official schematic does	[4]
BOOT, PWR	Programmable BOOT and PWR buttons	[1]

Also on the board [1][2]:

• USB Type-C for flashing and log output
• 3.7 V MX1.25 lithium battery header. The battery is optional: SKU 33305 includes one, and SKU 33366 (the “-EN” version) has none
• Pads for one I2C, one USB and one UART connection

About the USB-C port: device only, no host

In plain words: the USB port is for uploading code and seeing debug messages. It can’t connect to a USB keyboard or mouse.

The ESP32-C6’s native USB is a USB Serial/JTAG Controller. Espressif describes it as “a fixed-function USB device … that cannot be reconfigured to perform any function other than a serial port and JTAG debugging functionality” [5]. As a result:

• The port shows up on your computer as a serial port plus JTAG debugger. You can flash and debug with no USB-UART bridge chip.
• It cannot act as a USB host, so you cannot plug a USB keyboard, mouse or flash drive straight into it.
• It also cannot pretend to be a USB keyboard (HID) to a PC. Chips with a USB OTG controller, such as the ESP32-S3, can do that [5].

To get keyboard or mouse behaviour, the C6 has to use Bluetooth LE HID. Our next post shows a demo that does this.

Development options

Beginners: start with Arduino IDE.

Waveshare supports Arduino IDE and ESP-IDF. ESP-IDF projects use the waveshare/esp32_c6_touch_amoled_1_8 BSP from the ESP Component Registry [1][3]. The schematic, examples and factory recovery images are in Waveshare’s GitHub repository [3][4].

Sources

1. Waveshare documentation: https://docs.waveshare.com/ESP32-C6-Touch-AMOLED-1.8 (the legacy wiki https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/ESP32-C6-Touch-AMOLED-1.8 now redirects or is empty)
2. Waveshare product page: https://www.waveshare.com/esp32-c6-touch-amoled-1.8.htm
3. Waveshare official GitHub: https://github.com/waveshareteam/ESP32-C6-Touch-AMOLED-1.8
4. Waveshare schematic (PDF): https://files.waveshare.com/wiki/ESP32-C6-Touch-AMOLED-1.8/ESP32-C6-Touch-AMOLED-1.8-Schematic.pdf
5. Espressif ESP-IDF, USB Serial/JTAG Controller Console (ESP32-C6): https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/stable/esp32c6/api-guides/usb-serial-jtag-console.html