These are a new interesting MCU with an amazingly small footprint. The biggest problem I’m having is the lack of support for the C6 in the Arduino Cloud. Support exists for the C6 on the standalone app. I also have a more serious complaint regarding the cloud interface.
There is no way to search for a board identifier, e.g. “C6” to quickly see if it is supported! This is a very frustrating oversight. When adding new hardware, one simply shouldn’t have to read every entry in a combo box just in case the relevant bit is hidden somewhere in the rest of the description. Search box/filter, please! I’d have been ejected from the building if I’d ever done that!
Support for a specific sets of boards or microcontrollers is provided to Arduino Cloud Editor (and the same for Arduino IDE) by Arduino boards platforms. The support for the ESP32 family of boards is provided by the 3rd party "esp32" boards platform
The version of the "esp32" platform installed on the Arduino Cloud server is 2.0.17. ESP32-C6 support was added to the platform in version 3.0.0. So this is why Arduino Cloud does not have support for ESP32-C6 based boards. Likewise, the reason you find the board is supported when using Arduino IDE is because you have version 3.0.0 or newer of the "esp32" platform installed on your computer.
There are two different places in Arduino Cloud where you might select a board model:
As you pointed out, there is no search filter for the board list in the Device creation dialog. A request has been submitted to the Arduino Cloud developers for the addition of a search to that dialog.
The situation is better with the "Select device" dialog used to select a board model when using Arduino Cloud Editor to develop a non-IoT sketch:
However, I did discover a separate problem there when it comes to your specific example of wanting to use the search query "C6". The problem is that the search only becomes active when the query is at least three characters in length. So you could use a query like "esp32-c3", or even just "-c3" but the query like "c3" has no effect. I have notified the Arduino Cloud developers of this impact of the current minimum query length.
Thanks for asking the website developers to address the shortcomings.
Although 3 characters is a normal minimum in searches, it’s only because a two-character searches tend to return too many results, but that minimum doesn’t apply with part numbers and MCU identifiers where alphanumeric combinations are used to identify specific items.
By the way, non-alphanumeric characters should also be stripped from both part numbers and searches behind the scenes, especially if a search doesn’t return any results. That gets around different staff’s text formatting preferences. Just a thought :)
