Kevin Leon ran a power comparison of Arduino, Zephyr RTOS, and ESP-IDF using the same workloads and an automated measurement setup with Otii.
The study looks at workload measurements, SDK overhead, UART sync, automation methods, and real ESP32-C6 power trace analysis.
Some interesting findings:
- ESP-IDF had the most stable and lowest power use right from the start.
- Zephyr introduced a consistent RTOS overhead of roughly 10–12%.
- Arduino showed surprisingly good active efficiency, but also unexpected idle behavior and even a stack overflow event visible directly in the power trace.
Read the full study 