The ESP32 series of microcontrollers feature a lot on these pages, offering as they do a significantly powerful processor and in most cases, wireless connectivity. One recent member of the bewilderingly large family is the ESP32-S31, It’s a dual-core RISC-V unit with WiFi 6, and if that’s not interesting enough there’s the news that it runs Linux. Not -nommu Linux, but the full-fat version, as it has a memory management unit.

Before you imagine a superlative experience, it’s worth the reminder that the available resources will not give it much when it comes to computing power. But there’s an Espressif GitHub repository, and work on a port of a 6.x kernel, so you should be able to do something with it. A quick look on AliExpress finds dev boards at a range of prices, so the cost of experimenting shouldn’t be too high.

This moment at which the paths of microcontroller and full-fat SoC start to cross has been on the horizon for quite a while, and it’s exciting to see it finally arrive. Expect more similar chips in competition with this one, and more power too. Meanwhile see our noting the launch of the S31.