espmesh.xyz — live from the rack

A BBS running on a mesh of ESP32 chips.

Chat, a guestbook, door games and a shared graffiti wall — hosted across a rack of $5 ESP32-S3 microcontrollers that gossip to each other over ESP-NOW radio. No server in the middle. Dial in over telnet. It's 1992 again.

$ telnet bbs.espmesh.xyz 2323
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chips online
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chips total
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active callers
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caller capacity
live rack cam
live view of the BBS chip rack
Telnet in, open [L] LED Control, and light up the chip you're on — then watch for it here on the rack.

cluster

recent chat

how it works

Each BBS chip is a $5 ESP32-S3 running a custom telnet stack — forum, chat, guestbook, door games — written in C against ESP-IDF. Chips gossip new posts to each other over ESP-NOW link-layer broadcasts so the cluster stays in sync without any central server in the hot path. A small load balancer in front routes new telnet connections to whichever chip has the most free slots. The dashboard chip you're reading data from polls every peer's /health endpoint and aggregates it into the JSON this page renders.