Roadmap

Where µnleashed has got to and where it goes next, in plain words. Every station on the line is decided; nothing on it is a maybe. Each one says which version of the firmware brings it, and none of them has a date.

Checked against firmware 1.2.2.

One thing holds at every station: the board is the whole BBS. Nothing on the line needs a computer beside it, and the feature list says what that means in practice.

Done means released: on the installer and running on boards today.

Done

• A browser installer. Plug a board into a computer, press a button, and a few minutes later it is a BBS on your Wi-Fi. No toolchain, no command line.
• An S3 board with its own screen. A USB stick with a colour screen that shows who is on, the address to dial and how long the board has been up.
• Lights, and silent mode. An optional drive light that flickers as the board works, and a strip of pixels that lights up as callers arrive, so a board in a case looks alive. One switch, or a set of quiet hours, turns every light the board controls off again, the S3's screen included, for a board that lives in a bedroom.
• Backups to the SD card. Every night once you switch them on, and a restore from the card that waits until nobody is on.
• 80-column screens. Forms, lists and menus use the whole width of a PC terminal, while a 40-column machine keeps a layout made for its screen.
• The sysop's dashboard. The live view of the board, laid out for the screen it is on, 40 columns or 80.
• Camera boards. Boards with a camera on them. A caller types SNAPSHOT and downloads the picture.
• Missed pages go to mail. Ring for the sysop when nobody answers, and your note is waiting in the sysop's mail.
• An encrypted way in, on the S3. 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. beside telnet on every ESP32-S3 board, from firmware 1.1.2. Telnet stays, for the machines that cannot encrypt, and the privacy page says why that matters.
• No waiting on each other, in firmware 1.1.2. Logging in and off, LAST and the directory listing no longer hold up everybody else on the board; every board's firmware is smaller; and a chat line arrives whole.

Done in firmware 1.2.0

• The µnleashed link. Boards and the small boxes around them talk over the air with ESP-NOW, paired and encrypted, with no extra network to set up. Every board, the $15 dev board included.
• Sats. SATS lists every sat a board has, and CONFIG sats pairs, shares and sets them up. A camera sat adds a camera to any board with an SD card, anywhere in radio range, and up to five boards can share one: its own firmware, camsat 1.1.0, came out the same day and installs from the browser. A door sat is one a caller goes into with UPLINK and comes back from.
• One SNAPSHOT for every camera. SNAPSHOT n asks camera n, built in or a sat, and a spinner says "contacting camera sat #n" while it answers.
• CONFIG photos. The photo settings in one place, with pruning for every camera.
• Four more S3 boards on the installer. Every one running 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.: a 4.3 inch touch screen, 800 by 480, a whole status panel on the desk; a 2 inch touch screen with a camera; wired Ethernet, the most stable connection a board can have; and the Makerfabs 3.5 inch.
• Panel skins, on S3 screens. A board with a screen shows a picture of any machine you like, with the board's own live figures and lights on it.
• Switchboard lights. A strip pattern with a lamp a line: a caller's line in their rank's colour, a free one flickering with the traffic, like a modem's lamps.
• Plugins in their own repositories. Anybody can write one and build it into the firmware without touching the core.

Done in firmware 1.2.1

• Two more boards on the installer. The revision of the Makerfabs 3.5 inch board that they sell today, and a 4 inch square touch screen in a wall-box case, the only square screen the firmware draws. Ten boards in all.
• A new photo on the screen, the moment it is taken. On every board with a screen, a picture from the board's camera or from a camera sat takes the glass for a minute, whole, with the camera, who took it and when under it. A newer one replaces it.
• A load line on the screen. A dot runs a lap under the header and paints the trail behind it with how hard the board is working, so a glance says whether anything is holding up the callers, and a little drive beside the clock shows what the card and the flash are doing.
• Sats on the Ethernet board. It joins Wi-Fi beside the cable, so sats can pair, and callers still come in over the wire.
• Long forum posts read whole. A post of any length the format holds is shown, a line at a time with a [More] prompt like every other list, and posting no longer holds anybody else up.
• CALLS fits one screen: two columns of twelve hours instead of a paged list of twenty-four.
• The board says whether the line is encrypted, before you type anything: not securely encrypted over telnet, securely encrypted over 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., in those words.
• SyncTERM's autologin reaches the sysop node, so one keystroke logs a sysop all the way in.
• Fixes from 1.2.0's full test run.

Done in firmware 1.2.2

• The board opens its own port on the router. It asks the router to forward the port it listens on, so nobody has to find a router menu at all, and PORTMAP says which way it asked, what it got and what to do when the answer is no. It also says the one thing no other feature can: when your internet connection shares one address between many homes, no port can be opened and the board tells you so instead of looking broken. Three ways of asking, so most routers answer one of them. Every board, the $15 one included.
• Ten encrypted lines. All ten caller lines can be 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. at once on an S3 board, with a setting to carry fewer on a board you would rather keep the memory on.
• Two fixes to the ban list. A board with every ban slot full used to throw an old ban away to make room for a new one, and a ban nobody came back for could come back by itself after twenty-five days of uptime. The first is closed; the second is narrowed, and a board nobody calls for twenty-five days can still see it.
• Every line reachable by its number. The sysop's own line is line 0, so /p0 reaches them from the chat room the way /p3 reaches line 3. It used to be the one line you could not name.
• The plugin list says what is running. CONFIG shows each part of the board as on, switched off, or unable to run here at all, instead of listing them all the same and leaving you to work it out.
• The chat room says when your line is full. A room line has a ceiling, and reaching it used to be silent: your sentence simply stopped growing, which reads as the board swallowing the end of what you said. The board rings your bell once when you reach it now, and again if you rub a word out and carry on. /b silences it along with the other bells, and nothing new is shortened: the ceiling has not moved.

Next: firmware 1.2.3

• Asking the router without changing anything. A test that puts the question to your router and makes no forward at all, from CONFIG network or from the prompt, so you can find out whether any of this will work before you decide to let it. Firmware 1.2.2 can already tell you once you switch the forwarding on; this answers it without.
• A caller line that is not a network connection. A terminal wired to the board's own serial port becomes one of the ten lines, with the same login, chat and files as anybody dialling in: a VT220, a PC's serial port through a null modem, or a modem answering later on. No extra memory, and on any board with the pins to spare.
• A terminal anywhere in radio range. A small box with a serial port on it carries a terminal to the board over the link, so up to ten of them can be the board's ten lines with no network callers at all. It is the same path the ham radio dock uses.
• The serial bridge becomes a sat. Pointing a caller at a serial device stops being something the board does on its own pins and becomes a sat you walk into with UPLINK, which frees the board's port for the caller line above.

Then: firmware 1.3.0

• Your encrypted address on your listing. The board sends the port callers dial for 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., so the directory shows it as a second address line with a padlock. The directory has drawn that line since the day it was asked for and no board sends the port yet, so no listing carries one today.
• Two tighter locks on the sysop password. A limit on guessing it that cannot be used up, and a check that the key the directory gave you is the length the directory issues, so a key that lost characters on the way into the form is caught while you are typing rather than by a listing quietly going stale.
• Themes, for the terminal and the screen at once. Colours named by what they are for rather than by which colour they are, so one setting recolours the whole board: the house look, an amber terminal, green phosphor, and a couple of others.
• A menu on the glass. On a board with a touch screen, a corner icon opens shut down, reboot, a tap to change theme and a switch for whether new photos take the screen. The 4.3 inch board's layout moves closer to the square one at the same time, with the in and out figures and a mark beside each line that moved any.
• The features sat. A second cheap ESP32 beside any board that runs the heavier extras, so the board itself stays quick for everyone on it: credits earned from unused time and spent on more time or extra snaps, a voting booth, and games. Every board.
• The BBS classics. Sysop chat, oneliners with a list of words the host would rather not see, top tens and more under CALLS, FILE_ID.DIZ descriptions in the file areas, and rotating information pages, the way Diversi-DIAL rotated its messages.
• Camera sat 2. A timelapse saved on the card as one video file, by day, month or year, with the photos kept too if you like; a sat that holds its pictures while no board can take them and sends them when one can, so none are lost; and motion pictures the same way.
• ZMODEM. The transfer most terminals default to, beside the XMODEM and YMODEM a board already speaks, and the one that picks a broken download up where it stopped rather than starting again. Every board.
• Ham radio: packet callers through a docking radio. Callers on the amateur packet network reach the board by callsign. The radio, a Digirig and a small Linux computer running Direwolf and linbpq are only the radio's modem; an ESP32 docking radio carries each caller to the board over ESP-NOW. A ham logs in with an RF passphrase of their own, never their main password, and the pages are plain ASCII to suit the air. Every board.

Then: firmware 1.4.0

• FidoNet, through a sat. The message network BBSes have carried since the 1980s, in and out of your own forums, starting with the fsxNet network. A sat does the dialling, the packets and the bundles, so none of that lands on the board and nobody on it waits for a poll to finish.

Later

Decided, with no version yet.

• Every stock screen redrawn, in all three flavours a caller can get: more colour, a look that holds together from the welcome screen to the goodbye, and the slow-line versions kept lean for the machines that need them.
• A front door for a phone. A small box that is its own Wi-Fi network: join it, a page pops up by itself, and it lists the boards it can reach with a terminal in the browser. Nothing to install, so somebody with only a phone can call a board. Plant a few around a field and a whole site is on the air. Its first phase works: the page pops up by itself on a phone, and it reaches a board over the network it is already on, with no change to the board at all. It is early and not released. Reaching a board over the air instead needs the caller line of firmware 1.2.3.
• SSH in a browser, from the directory. A Connect button on a listing, with the encryption done inside the reader's own browser, so what carries it across the internet cannot read a word of it. No host rights from a browser, ever: that stays a terminal program and the password.
• A .onion face for the directory, for reading the list without saying who you are. It hides readers, not boards: a listed board has published its own address by choice, and still announces over the ordinary internet. Costed, not built.
• More room on the camera boards. Their memory rearranged, so more of the chip's own is free for callers.
• More kinds of sat. Remote control, for switches, relays and sensors on another board; Home Assistant; a repeater that carries the link past where a board can hear, and works with others to reach further again; and your own, on the open link protocol.
• Swiping through the photos on a board with a touch screen, where firmware 1.2.1 shows each new one as it arrives.
• Linked chat, one superchat. Chat rooms joined across boards, the way Diversi-DIAL linked its systems, so a quiet board borrows company from a busy one: µnleashed boards, and Diversi-DIAL and GTalk-style systems, in one room.
• The board updates itself. It fetches a new version, checks that it is genuine, and puts it on when the sysop says yes. No USB cable.
• Posts to social media, through a relay. A small program of its own, run on your own network, that takes the board's news (a new photo, a new post) and sends it on to where you choose, holding every outside password so the board never does.

Want to be on the air when the next station opens? A board takes an afternoon, and most of that is deciding what to call it.

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