What a board can do

A whole BBSA bulletin board system: a small online community on one computer, which people connect to from theirs to chat, leave messages and share files., a community of your own, on a board about the size of a stick of gum. It answers a computer from the eighties and a laptop from this year in the same chat room, runs all year on a phone charger, and goes from the box to its first visitor in about five minutes. Here is what that adds up to.

• No computer needed. The board is the whole BBS: no PC, no Raspberry Pi, and nothing to keep updating underneath it. The dev board costs about $15.
• Installed from your browser. Plug the board in, press a button, and set its Wi-Fi on the same page. No programming tools, and about five minutes.
• Works with any computer, old or new. It works out what each visitor is joining from as they connect, and draws its screens to fit.
• A library on a card. A micro SD card of up to 32 GB holds a shared library of files people can download, even to computers from the 1980s.
• Hardware you can watch. An optional drive light that flickers as the board works and a strip of lights that brightens as visitors arrive.
• A screen of its own, one step up. The Waveshare S3, about $20, shows who is on, one row a person, with the board's name, address and uptime taking turns at the top, a Wi-Fi antenna that fills with the signal, and small icons that appear for waiting mail, someone asking for the host and an upload to approve. Bigger screens start with the 3.5 inch Makerfabs, about $30.
• A camera visitors can use. On a camera board, type SNAPSHOT from any computer that connects, and download the picture a few seconds later. From firmware 1.2.0 a camera sat adds a camera to any board.
• It looks after itself. A backup to the SD card every night, and a forgotten host password put right by holding the BOOT button, with nothing to reinstall.
• It puts itself on the map. Switch on the listing and the board appears in the directory by itself. There is no form to fill in.
• Under two watts, measured. The dev board is about half a watt from a phone charger. Even the board with the 4.3 inch screen running is under two, so a small solar panel runs either one.
• Coming: one chat across many boards. Chat rooms linked between boards, so a quiet board borrows company from a busy one: other µnleashed boards, and Diversi-DIAL and GTalk-style systems, in one superchat. It is on the roadmap, not built yet.

It is the same idea as the boards of the 1980s, where the computer on the desk was the BBS: an Apple II, an Atari 800 or a TRS-80 in somebody's spare room. This time the computer is a chip, Wi-Fi is the phone line, and you can build one this weekend.

Build one

Under two watts

The heaviest board µnleashed runs on is the Waveshare 4.3 inch: a 4.3 inch screen with its backlight on, being fed pixels continuously, with Wi-Fi up and SSHAn encrypted way of connecting to a board, beside telnet: what you type is scrambled on the way, so only the board can read it. running. Rob measured one of those, running, at under two watts. Every other board draws less, and the $15 dev board with no screen is about half a watt.

The comparison people reach for is a BBS on a real computer, and it is a fair one: a desktop or a laptop has to stay awake for as long as the board is up, and that is tens of watts rather than one or two. But the honest comparison is a Raspberry Pi, which is what most people would otherwise reach for, and a Pi deserves its due. A Pi is a few watts, far better than a PC, and it will run a BBS perfectly well. A µnleashed board is a fraction of a Pi again, and it needs no Pi underneath it at all.

We are not going to put a figure on what that saves you. Electricity costs differ by country and by tariff, and a number we worked out here would be invented rather than measured. What two watts does buy is worth more than the bill:

• It runs off anything. A phone charger, a power bank, a USB port on something else that is already on.
• It can go where there is no mains. A couple of watts is a small solar panel and a battery, which is why a board can sit in a shed, a loft or an outbuilding and simply stay up. The same arithmetic is what makes a repeater on a fence post worth designing.
• Nothing underneath it has to stay awake. No operating system, no disk, no fan, nothing to keep patched.

That is the difference between a computer that happens to be running BBS software and a board that is the BBS, and it is why this project puts the chip at the centre rather than treating it as a cheap way to host something.

How it compares with the apps people use now

Most online communities today live inside somebody else's service: a chat app, a social media group, a hosted forum. Those are easy to start and easy to find. A board is the other kind of place, one you own. Here is how the two compare, with each column checked against the company's own pages.

The table scrolls sideways: swipe for the other four.

They win on reach and ease: millions of people already have the apps, strangers can find you, and nobody has to plug anything in. A board is for a community that would rather have a place of its own. Each column was checked against its company's own pages in September 2026, and its heading links to them. What travelling in plain text means.

Privacy forward, or a privacy policy

On the left, what a µnleashed board does. On the right, what Discord and Meta, which runs Facebook Groups, say in their own terms and privacy policies, read in September 2026. Each name links to the page it is quoted from.

Hosted forums and Mastodon servers depend on whoever runs them, and plenty are good: Discourse says on its pricing page that "your data always belongs to you" and lets you download a backup, and Mastodon says it "will never serve ads" and lets an account move to another server.

A µnleashed board has no ads, no trackers and no outside scripts, and what members write stays on the host's board. This website runs no analytics either. The directory hears nothing until the host switches the listing on, and then only what the list shows: the board's name, description, host, address and port, lines in use, uptime, time zone and chosen badges, plus the day's call counts if the host shares them. Never who is on.

The honest part, because it matters: over telnet, the words between a member and a board travel as plain text, the way they always did on a BBS. Anyone in a position to listen on the way could read them, the way the next table in a café could hear you. What that means in practice, and the short version: say what you would say in public, and use a password you use nowhere else. An encrypted way in, SSHAn encrypted way of connecting to a board, beside telnet: what you type is scrambled on the way, so only the board can read it., arrived on the ESP32-S3 boards in firmware 1.1.2, beside telnet rather than instead of it.

How it compares with other BBS software

The BBS programs you are most likely to have met are good software with years of work in them, and each one runs on a PC with an operating system under it. µnleashed is firmwareThe software that lives on the board's chip. µnleashed is firmware: the board runs nothing else., the software that lives on the board, and the board, from about $15, is the whole computer. Each project's name links to its own pages, which is where its column was checked, in September 2026.

The table scrolls sideways: swipe for the other five.

The big packages still do plenty this board does not yet: FidoNet-style message networks, door games, ZMODEM, and many more callers at once. Firmware 1.2.0 has the way in to door games, door sats a caller enters with UPLINK, and the doors to run on them are still to come; everything else that is decided is on the roadmap.