LILYGO T-Dongle C5

Overview

The LILYGO T-Dongle C5 is a USB dongle-form-factor development board built around the ESP32-C5, Espressif's dual-band WiFi 6 chip. Unlike typical development boards, it plugs directly into a USB-A port, making it convenient for use as a wireless adapter, sniffer, or embedded compute module in host systems.

The board integrates a 0.96-inch ST7735 IPS color LCD (80x160 pixels, 65K colors) with 4-wire SPI interface for displaying status information or custom UI. TF (microSD) card support is included for data logging. With 16MB of Flash and 8MB of PSRAM, the T-Dongle C5 has significantly more memory than the T7-C5, enabling more complex applications.

The ESP32-C5's dual-band WiFi 6 (2.4 and 5 GHz), BLE 5, and 802.15.4 (Zigbee/Thread) support make this dongle highly versatile. It is available as a pre-sale item with an estimated shipping date of March 10, 2025. A highly sensitive ceramic antenna provides reliable wireless performance in compact form factor.

Firmware Compatibility

• Arduino — Use the ESP32 Arduino core (v3.x+) with ESP32-C5 board support.
• ESP-IDF — Full Espressif SDK for advanced wireless stack access.
• Zigbee — Native Zigbee stack via ESP-Zigbee SDK.
• Thread / Matter — Supported via ESP-IDF OpenThread and esp-matter components.

Flashing Guide

1. Install Arduino ESP32 core v3.1.0+ for ESP32-C5 support.
2. Plug the T-Dongle C5 into a USB-A port (use a USB-A to USB-A extension if needed for direct board access).
3. Select ESP32C5 Dev Module in Arduino IDE.
4. Set Flash to 16MB and enable PSRAM if your sketch requires it.
5. For display output, install TFT_eSPI or LovyanGFX and configure for the ST7735 driver with the correct pin definitions from the LILYGO GitHub repository.
6. Flash and monitor via Serial at 115200 baud.