Features

Everything a µnleashed board does, grouped the way callers and hosts look for things, and then how it compares with the other BBSA bulletin board system: a small online community on one computer, which people connect to from theirs to chat, leave messages and share files. software people run today.

As of firmware 1.2.2.

The chip is the whole BBS

The logins, the accounts, the messages, the rules and the screens all run on the board itself, a chip about the size of a stick of gum. There is no PC behind it and no Raspberry Pi to lean on, now or later. If a computer ever turns up, it is an optional helper for one big job, the way the packet radio node will use a small Linux computer as its radio's modem, and even then the BBS stays on the chip.

Under two watts

The heaviest board in the range is the Waveshare 4.3 inch: an 800 by 480 screen with its backlight on, the panel being fed pixels continuously, 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 a running board like that at under two watts. Every other board is less, and the $15 dev board with no screen at all is about half a watt.

That is worth stating because the comparison is not close. BBS software on a desktop or a laptop needs the whole computer awake for as long as the board is up, and that is tens of watts. A Raspberry Pi is the fair comparison rather than a laptop, and it is a good one: a Pi is a few watts, far better than a PC, and it will run a BBS well. A µnleashed board is a fraction of a Pi again, and it never needs the Pi underneath it.

What two watts actually buys is not a smaller bill. It is that a board can be powered by a phone charger and left on a shelf for a year, or run from a small solar panel and a battery somewhere with no mains at all. That is the difference between a computer that happens to be running BBS software and a board that is the BBS, which is the whole reason this project puts the microcontroller at the centre. It is also what makes a repeater on a fence post worth designing.

Calling in

• Telnet from nearly anything. A PC, a Mac, a phone with a free app, or an old machine through a Wi-Fi modem: an Amiga, an Apple II, an Atari 800, an IBM PC or a VT220 on a serial line.
• SSH on every ESP32-S3 board. Encrypted from the caller's computer to the board, on the same port as telnet or one of its own for SyncTERM. Telnet stays open beside it for the machines that cannot encrypt. From firmware 1.2.2 all ten caller lines can be SSH at once, where it was eight, with a setting to carry fewer on a board whose memory you want for something else. The base ESP32 has no SSH: that is what the S3 buys.
• Over SSH there is nothing to install. The ssh command is already on most computers: in Terminal on a Mac and on Linux, in Windows Terminal or PowerShell on Windows 10 and 11. So ssh -p 6422 yourhandle@the.board.address reaches an ESP32-S3 board with nothing installed, and the call is encrypted. Your handle is the user name, and each board's listing says its own port. It is a plain terminal rather than an app made for boards, so the screens, the chat and the messages are all there and a file transfer still wants an app that speaks XMODEM or YMODEM. The directory draws a second address line with a padlock for any board that publishes an SSH port, and boards start publishing it in firmware 1.3.0, so no listing carries one yet.
• It works out what you joined from. ANSI, UTF-8, PETSCII at 40 or 80 columns, or plain ASCII, found as you connect, and every screen is laid out for 40 columns and for 80.
• It says how you are connected. Before the first screen, every caller is told whether the line is securely encrypted, in those words: it is over SSH, and it is not over telnet.
• Ten callers at once, and a busy line that tells the eleventh to try again rather than leaving them hanging.

Talking

• A chat room with the old commands. In the style of Diversi-DIAL and GTalk: private lines, a private conversation that holds the room back, away notes, squelch, a replay of what went by, and a vote to kick when no staff are in. A room line has a ceiling, and from firmware 1.2.2 the board rings your bell when you reach it rather than letting your sentence stop growing in silence.
• Mail between callers. A mailbox with reply, save and delete, and a line at login when something is waiting.
• Forums. Topics a host sets up, conversations inside each, and a pointer that remembers what you have read. They need an SD card. From firmware 1.2.1 a post of any length the format holds reads whole, a line at a time with a [More] prompt like every other list, and posting holds nobody else up.
• Pages and ringing the sysop. PAGE reaches another caller wherever they are on the board; OPERATOR rings the host, and a ring nobody answers waits in the host's mail. From firmware 1.2.2 every line answers to its own number, the host's own line included, so /p0 reaches them from the chat room the way /p3 reaches line 3.
• Information pages. Up to ten pages of news and notices the host writes on the board.
• Colour and effects in messages. @-codes in a post, a mail or a chat line: colour, a blink, a typewriter, a spinner, the date. CODES lists them.
• Accounts and guests. Sign up with a handle and a password, or visit as a guest for fifteen minutes with nothing saved.

Files

• File areas on a memory card. A micro SD card of up to 32 GB holds a shared library, each area with its own name, its own descriptions and who may read, upload or remove.
• XMODEM, XMODEM-1K and YMODEM, to download and to upload, so a file reaches a machine from the 1980s as well as a laptop.
• Uploads wait for approval. A new file goes live only once staff say so, and staff are told one is waiting.

Photos and sats

• A camera callers can use. On a camera board, a caller types SNAPSHOT and downloads the picture. Timelapse pictures file themselves.
• Camera sats. A small ESP32-CAM that adds a camera to any board with an SD card, anywhere in radio range, pairing over the air with its own key. Up to five boards can share one, and a motion sensor on it takes a picture when something moves.
• One SNAPSHOT for every camera. SNAPSHOT 2 asks camera 2, built in or a sat, and the board says what the sat is doing while it answers.
• Door sats. A box a caller goes into with UPLINK and comes back from, the way big boards once ran their doors on machines of their own. The way in is built; the doors are still to come.
• CONFIG photos. Limits per caller, across every camera, and how long pictures are kept.
• A new photo on the screen, from firmware 1.2.1: on a board with a display, a picture from the board's camera or from a sat takes the glass for a minute, whole, with the camera, who took it and when under it. A newer one replaces it.
• Sats on the Ethernet board, from firmware 1.2.1: it joins Wi-Fi beside the cable, so sats pair, and callers still come in over the wire.

Running the board

• Every setting from the terminal. CONFIG puts each page of settings in a form, at 40 columns and at 80. No web page, and no file to edit on a PC.
• Staff of three. A sysop and two co-sysops, each with the powers the host gives them: kick, snoop, broadcast, give a caller more time.
• Protection built in. Three wrong passwords end a call, five lock a handle for fifteen minutes, and an address that keeps guessing is banned for a while.
• Watching it run. WHO, LAST for the last fifty calls, CALLS for the busy hours, two columns of twelve on one screen from firmware 1.2.1, and SYS, DASH and HARDWARE for the host.
• Backups. Over the network when the host presses the board's BOOT button, or to the SD card every night.
• It looks after itself. Holding BOOT puts a forgotten host password back, or resets the board, with nothing to reinstall, on boards that have the button.
• Closed until it is opened. A new board takes no calls until the person who set it up opens it.
• Installed from a browser. Plug it in, press a button in Chrome or Edge, and set its Wi-Fi on the same page.
• Listed by itself. Switch on the listing and the board appears in the directory with no form to fill in.
• It can open its own port, from firmware 1.2.2: the board asks your router to forward its ports to it, the way a games console does, so letting people in from outside need not mean a router menu at all. It is off until you switch it on, what you get is the same forward you would have made by hand with nothing of ours in between, and it is honest about the two cases it cannot fix: a router that will not do it, and an internet provider sharing one address among its customers. It says which of the two you are in rather than leaving you an evening of research to find out.
• The settings say what is running, from firmware 1.2.2: CONFIG marks each part of the board as running, switched off, or switched on and unable to run here, which is what a part that keeps its files on a memory card says on a board with no card in it.
• A clean shutdown. SHUTDOWN counts down on every caller's screen before the board goes quiet.

Hardware

• Ten tested boards. From the ESP32 dev board at about $15 to ESP32-S3 boards with a screen, a camera or wired Ethernet, up to a 4 inch square touch panel in a wall-box case.
• A status screen, and skins. On the S3 boards with a display: who is on, the address to dial and how long it has been up, or a picture of a machine from another decade with the board's live figures on it.
• A load line on the screen, from firmware 1.2.1: a dot runs a lap under the header and paints the trail behind it with how hard the board is working, with a little drive beside the clock for the card and the flash.
• Lights. An optional drive light and a strip of pixels that lights up as callers arrive, and one switch, or a set of quiet hours, to turn every light off.
• A serial bridge. A device wired to the board's serial port, reached from any terminal, with the host deciding who may type to it.
• Ham radio, coming. Packet callers reaching the board by callsign, in firmware 1.3.0 at the earliest.

Build oneSee the roadmap

How it compares with other BBS software

Every program in these tables is good software, and most have years of work in them. Each column was checked against the project's own pages or repository in September 2026, and its name links there. A question mark means the project's own pages do not say, not that it cannot.

On a PC

The table scrolls sideways, with more columns to the right.

Where they win, they win by a lot: decades of work, FidoNet and QWK, ZMODEM, doors that already exist, and more callers than ten. Where µnleashed wins is under it all: there is no PC, no operating system and nothing else to keep updated, on a board you can hold.

On small machines

The table scrolls sideways: swipe for the other four.

espbbs is the other board we know of that runs a BBS on a microcontroller, an ESP8266, and it has not changed since 2017. The Commodore boards are the real thing, and a caller of theirs is welcome on this one too.

A DDial-style chat system

This board's chat room is modelled on Diversi-DIAL and GTalk, read out of their own manuals: no prompt character, a line a caller sends is #node:handle) and then what they typed, /s lists the room, and /p holds a private conversation open. MAGVIZ DDIAL+ is the nearest living relative of that design, so anybody who knows one will recognise the other: layered conversations, unique line numbers, and any username you like at any time.

It is not a BBS package, and the table below is not the one above. MAGVIZ is a chat system you visit in a browser, run for you by somebody else; this is software you run on hardware you own, which also keeps forums, files and mail. A chat system with no file areas is not missing them.

Both keep DDial alive, at opposite ends. If you want DDial-style chat right now, with no hardware, no setup and nothing to run, MAGVIZ is the better answer and it is open in a browser in seconds. µnleashed is for when you want the thing itself: your own machine, your own rules, and a line an old computer can dial into.

MAGVIZ also runs the hub the DDial-style systems link through, and at least one other project joins it as a station, so the superchat on the roadmap has a precedent rather than only an idea. Nothing is arranged with anybody, and linking would need their agreement.

Not in the tables: Citadel, which lives on as a mail and groupware server with a BBS-style text client and a web interface, a different kind of thing; Iniquity 3, a rebuild in progress whose own pages list telnet and ANSI so far; and the original Maximus, unchanged since 2015, which Maximus NG carries on.

Sources

Checked on 29 September 2026, and MAGVIZ DDIAL+ on 4 October 2026.

• MAGVIZ DDIAL+: magviz.ca, its public chat, ddial.com
• Synchronet: synchro.net, wiki.synchro.net, GitHub mirror
• Mystic: mysticbbs.com, wiki.mysticbbs.com
• ENiGMA½: enigma-bbs.github.io, GitHub
• WWIV: docs.wwivbbs.org, GitHub
• Talisman: GitLab
• Maximus NG: documentation, GitHub
• Renegade: GitHub
• espbbs: GitHub
• Image BBS: GitHub, 8-Bit Boyz, The Oasis BBS
• C*Base: home page
• PETSCII BBS Builder: GitHub
• Several at once: fsxNet's list of BBS projects

Room to grow

The board stays small on purpose, and grows by adding to it rather than by making the core bigger.

• Plugins. Everything past the core is a plugin, built into the firmware, and from 1.2.0 a plugin can live in a repository of its own, so anybody can write one without touching the core.
• Sats. New hardware arrives over the air instead of on the board's pins. The camera sat is here; remote control, sensors, Home Assistant, a repeater that carries the link past where a board can hear, and sats of your own are coming, with no dates yet.
• Doors. The door framework hands a caller to a door sat and brings them back, telling the door who they are, how wide their screen is and how long they have left.
• The features sat, in firmware 1.3.0. A second cheap ESP32 beside any board, carrying the heavier extras: credits, a voting booth and games.

Everything that is decided, and which version brings it, is on the roadmap.

See the roadmap