Seeed Studio's XIAO MG24 and XIAO MG24 Sense boards target battery-powered Matter and BLE applications

Seeed Studio has added two members to its XIAO family of tiny MCU boards with the XIAO MG24 and XIAO MG24 Sense boards based on Silicon Labs EFR32MG24 multi-protocol wireless SoC and designed for battery-powered Matter over Thread and Bluetooth LE 5.3 applications.

Both 21×17.8 mm USB-C boards feature a 78MHz Silabs MG24 Cortex-M33 microcontroller with 256kB SRAM and 1536KB flash, an additional 4MB SPI flash on-board, and 22 pins and pads for GPIO pins, analog inputs, and power signals, plus a reset button and two LEDs. The “Sense” model adds an analog microphone and a 6-axis IMU sensor.

Seeed Studio XIAO MG24 Sense — XIAO MG24 Sense board with microphone visible on the corner of the MG24 module and above the ceramic antenna

XIAO MG24/MG24 Sense specifications:

SoC – Silicon Labs EFR32MG24 (EFR32MG24B220F1536IM48-B)
- MCU cores
  - Arm Cortex-M33 @ 78.0 MHz with DSP instruction and floating-point unit for user application
  - Arm Cortex-M0+ core for wireless
- Memory – 256 KB RAM
- Storage – 1536 KB flash
- Wireless protocols – Matter, OpenThread, Zigbee, Bluetooth Low Energy 5.3, Bluetooth Mesh, Proprietary 2.4 GHz, Multiprotocol
Storage – 4MB SPI flash
USB – 1x USB-C port for power and programming
Sensors (XIAO MG24 Sense only)
- Analog microphone
- 6-axis IMU sensor
Expansion
- 14-pin through and castellated holes with up to 11x analog input, 11x GPIO, 1x I2C, 1x UART, 1x SPI, 5V, 3.3V, and GND
- 8 pads with up to 8x GPIO, 8x analog input, I2C, UART, and SPI
- All GPIO pins support PWM
Security – Hardware Cryptographic Acceleration, True Random Number Generator, ARM TrustZone, Secure Boot, Secure Debug Unlock, etc.
Debugging/Programming
- 4x pads for MG24 MCU
- 4x pads for SAMD11 MCU (the use of this microcontroller is currently undocumented)
Misc
- Reset Button
- Power and User LEDs
- Antennas – u.FL connector and ceramic antenna
Power Supply
- 5V via USB-C port
- 2x pads for battery connection
Power Consumption
- Low power – 4.66μA
- Normal – 6.71mA
- Sleep – 1.91mA
Dimensions – 21 x 17.8 mm
Temperature Range – -20°C to 70°C

The XIAO MG24 (Sense) is suitable for Matter Smart Home devices such as smart locks, sensors, and lighting, as well as low-power remote controls, TinyML applications using on-device machine learning for gesture recognition and voice commands, and battery-powered environmental monitors gathering temperature, humidity, and air quality data.

Seeed Studio says the Matter module is programmable in the Arduino IDE, and even provides a link to instructions to get started (https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/xiao_mg24_getting_started), but sadly, it currently points to a 404 error page… They still have time since the modules are scheduled to start shipping on November 30. The company did share a comparison table between the XIAO ESP32C6 and the new XIAO MG24 (Sense) since both support BLE, Thread, Matter, and Zigbee.

The XIAO MG24 and XIAO MG24 Sense boards are available for pre-order at $7.9 and $10.9 respectively, but a limited-time 10% discount brings the prices down to $7.11 and $9.81 for the first 100 purchases.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.