Build one

A board of your own, on hardware that costs less than a takeaway.

Nothing here is a kit and nothing is soldered to anything. If you have an ESP32 dev board in a drawer, you already have most of it.

What you need

• An ESP32 with 4 MB of flash. The reference board is a bare ESP32-WROOM-32E: 520 KB of SRAM, 4 MB of flash, no PSRAM, Bluetooth off. Any module with the same flash will do. A dev board with a USB-serial chip needs nothing but the cable.
• A USB cable, and that is the whole bill of materials for a dev board. A bare module also wants 3V3, ground, EN pulled up, GPIO0 to ground while you flash it, and a USB-serial adapter on the console pins.
• Wi-Fi, 2.4 GHz. The board scans every channel and joins the strongest access point with your SSID, so a mesh needs no special handling.
• Power. It runs from the USB port you flashed it with, a phone charger, or 3V3 on a bench supply. A few tens of milliamps idling with six callers on, with peaks when the radio transmits, so anything that can deliver 500 mA is comfortable.

Getting it running

git clone https://github.com/rwmech/unleashed_BBS
cd unleashed_BBS
cp include/secrets.h.example include/secrets.h     # SSID and passphrase
cp data/system.cfg.example data/system.cfg         # timezone, passwords, limits
pio run -t flashall
pio device monitor

The console tells you the address it came up on:

online 192.168.0.109  dial in: telnet 192.168.0.109 6400

The activity LED holds on for a second once the board is actually listening, so you know it is ready without dialling in to find out.

On a normal home network the board also answers to unleashed.local, which is the hostname setting doing double duty as the DHCP and mDNS name.

Calling it

Any telnet client. SyncTERM is the one worth installing if you have none. A Commodore 64 with a TeensyROM works too, and so does a VT220 on a serial adapter. The board works out what it is talking to on connect: ANSI with CP437 or UTF-8, PETSCII at 40 or 80 columns, or plain ASCII, and it draws itself accordingly.

Keeping it

Firmware updates do not cost you the board. Accounts, settings, chat mail and your directory listing live on their own flash partition, and pio run -t flashall cannot reach it: the filesystem upload only rewrites the screens.

The backup window is the other half of that. Hold the BOOT button while logged in as sysop and the board opens an HTTP server for a few minutes: download a zip with the configuration, the accounts and the screens in it, edit them on a real keyboard, upload it back. Uploads are staged and applied only after you say yes.

Putting it on the internet

Forwarding port 6400 from your router is what makes a board callable from outside, and it is a decision to make deliberately rather than by accident. This is plain telnet: passwords cross the wire in the clear, and anybody sharing a network with a caller can read everything they type. The board tells new callers that before they choose a password, and so should you.

If that is fine with you, it was fine with everybody in 1985 too.

How to forward a port on your router, with step by step pages for NETGEAR, TP-Link, ASUS, Xfinity gateways, eero and Google Nest Wifi, and an honest list of the things that will stop it working.

Listing it here

Turn on the announce plugin and the board sends a small heartbeat every ten minutes saying it exists. Nothing about any caller is ever in it: the board's name, who runs it, how to reach it, and how many lines are busy.

CONFIG announce

A listing is earned by three hours of sustained heartbeats, not by asking, and it disappears when the heartbeats stop. ANNOUNCE TEST prints the exact bytes that would leave the board and sends nothing, so you can read it before you trust it.

You do not have to use this directory. The protocol is documented, the server is a single Python file, and a board can post to several directories at once. A directory nobody can replace would contradict the whole point.

The source

Everything is at github.com/rwmech/unleashed_BBS, GPL v2 or later. The directory server you are reading is at github.com/rwmech/unleashed_directory under the same licence, so you can run the whole stack yourself and never speak to us again.