How to Enable Offline Chat Communications Over Wi-Fi with an ESP32

PirateBox is a great way to communicate with others nearby when cellular and Wi-Fi networks aren't available. With it, you can anonymously share any kind of media or document and even talk to one another by voice — without being online. However, it needs a Raspberry Pi, which is more expensive than ESP32 boards, and if you only need a text-based chat, there's a much simpler option.


With a cheap ESP32 microcontroller and the ChatterBox sketch for Arduino, you can create an offline anonymous chat server for communicating with others via text. As long as they can connect to the ESP32's network and visit the server's chat page, they can leave messages for others to read, as well as see everything that's already been written in there.


Something like this might be useful for a variety of situations, such as after a disaster in an area that's super remote or as a pop-up community billboard to learn about important things going on in the area. For example, during protests and demonstrations, people can connect and provide everyone with the next steps, warn others of trouble spots or police activity, and secretly devise plans of action, among other things — all so that everyone remains anonymous.


Using an ESP32 board will keep your costs down, so there's no expensive Raspberry Pi like the PirateBox needs. Five bucks is all it takes, give or take. And it has the processing power necessary to put up a chat server and create a Wi-Fi access point to connect to it. The chat server works right in a web brow ..

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