micro-RDK
ALPHA
The micro-RDK is in alpha mode and many features supported by the RDK are still being added to the micro-RDK. Stability is not guaranteed. Breaking changes are likely to occur, and occur often.
The micro-RDK is a lightweight version of the Robot Development Kit (RDK) which can run on resource-limited embedded systems.
The only microcontroller the micro-RDK currently supports is the ESP32.
To use Viam on a microcontroller, you need to both:
- Run the micro-RDK on your microcontroller
- Run the full-featured
viam-server
on another machine
To run both the micro-RDK and viam-server
, you currently need two robots: one controlling robot which runs viam-server
and a worker robot which runs the micro-RDK on your microcontroller.
This second “robot” can be as simple as an instance of viam-server
running on your development machine.

The micro-RDK currently only supports:
- GPIO pins
- Analog readers
- Motors
- Encoders
See GitHub for code examples and more information about the micro-RDK.
Next steps
Have questions, or want to meet other people working on robots? Join our Community Discord.
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